


When the Fight is all We Know

by DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee



Series: True Love or Something [30]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Feels, Dysfunctional Family, Established Relationship, F/M, Family Drama, Family Feels, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 01:49:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10479357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee/pseuds/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee
Summary: “Uh, Hey.  Do you know who I am?”  The stranger-not-stranger says.Keith’s not proud of what he says next. “You’d better be dying or something equally Hallmark or this reunion is a waste of my time.”An eyebrow quirks in a familiar way and Keith wonders if his mother stole that facial expression from this man or if he borrowed it from her or if they made it together, like a beta-test version of Keith himself.  “So, judging from the overt hostility I’d say she either told you too much or not enough about me.”Keith's father read Shiro's book.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU ALL, your continued support of this series means the world to me. 
> 
> This is the long-awaited Keith's Dad fic. Or at least it's chapter one of it. I'm planning on this being maybe 2 or 3 chapters, depending on how long it turns out to be. It was going to be a one-shot but it just go too awkward. 
> 
> Fun fact, while Pidge's Dad, who arguably has close to the same number of on-screen lines as Dad Kogane, has an official name...Keith's dad doesn't? Apparently? I couldn't find one anywhere. Thanks for that, Voltron writers. So just like Keith's mom's name, personality and entire identity in this 'verse are no longer anywhere near canonically correct, so it shall be with his father. I'm okay with it, and will not be ret-conning anything if/when I'm proved wrong, because what I write for this AU is canon as far as this AU is concerned. I'm very stubborn like that. 
> 
> ALSO, THIS IS FIC NUMBER 30 IN THIS SERIES AND I'M SO PROUD AND CONFUSED. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN??? HOW DID I WRITE THIS SPRAWLING EPIC? I am no longer in control of my life, apparently. *shrugs*

**When the Fight is all We Know**

            He met Diana Kogane on a clear September night almost thirty years ago and he still remembers her today. The way she looked, standing there in her grey cargo pants and combat boots (not the patent-leather kind they sell in malls to moody teenagers, the practical kind that have seen some dust and dirt and maybe some blood too)…it stuck with him, clung like cobwebs to the bumps and ridges of his mind.

            Her dark hair kicking out in a riot of cowlicks around her face, sharp brows arching over piercing amber-gold eyes, no, there was nothing forgettable about Diana Kogane.

            “What are you doing?” he’d asked her and she’d turned his way, tipping her head to the side and folding her arms across her chest. The carnival rides behind her splashed a riot of color across the canvas of her skin, pinks and purples and blues. She looked like something from another world. He wondered if she’d held still, if he had more than this moment, if he could capture some of that ephemeral nature in ink and paint. He’d sketch her outline in fountain pen and black ink, shade in her shape with watercolor. A splash of color and light here and gone in seconds.

            “You can’t do that here,” he’d told her and she’d laughed.

            “If you don’t know what I’m doing, how can you know I’m not supposed to do it?”

            “You’re not authorized to be back here. It’s a safety hazard.” It was true – they weren’t allowed to let anyone back here, near the heavy machinery. His boss liked to say that letting patrons wander was a lawsuit waiting to happen. One of his coworkers, the guy who ran the kiddie area, the one with the spinning teacups and baby rollercoaster, would shrug and say ‘plus, it ruins the magic when you see how it actually works’. There are two types of people.

            “Do you see me touching anything?” she crooked a smile.

            He shook his head, refusing to be charmed (he already was), “Doesn’t matter, you can’t be back here.”

            “If it doesn’t matter, then why’d you ask me what I was doing?”

            “What?”

            “Exactly,” she winked at him, “you led with a question. You asked me what I was doing _before_ you told me to stop. You’re curious.”

            He shrugged. “Sure.”

            She laughed. He wasn’t sure what was funny but he smirked anyway. “I’m searching for aliens.”

            He chuckled, “We’ve already got them – funhouse number two.”

            “Not little green men. Real ones.”

            “Uh-huh.”

            “Why the skepticism?”

            Why indeed. “Seems weird to go looking for them. What’re you going to do if you find them? Never seems to work out in the movies – finding the aliens, I mean.”

            She blinked at him, long and slow, considering. “You know, that’s the first reasonable explanation for skepticism I’ve ever heard.”

            He shrugged, at a loss. “Okay.”

            She suddenly grinned, bright and sharp. “Have you ever done something just to do it? To know, deep down, that you’d done this thing? It doesn’t get you anything, you don’t benefit from it, but you feel better for doing it. There’s a satisfaction there. Just from knowing you did it.”

            “Sure.” He was here, wasn’t he? He’d run away and joined the circus. Well. He’d run away from home years ago, when he was a dumb, angry, lonely kid. He hadn’t so much ‘joined the circus’ as realized that there’s only so many places a hungry, angry high school dropout can find work. Maintenance for a carnival ride company was one of his better options. He’d done worse, had worse.

            “That’s part of why I’m looking for them. I know they’re there, it’s math; it’s science. The probabilities are in our favor. I just want to be able to say that I’ve seen them. I know who they are.”

            “Seems like kind of flimsy reasoning.” He couldn’t really judge.

            She looked at him, really looked at him. It was almost painful, having her eyes on him like that. “Sometimes the real world isn’t all its cracked up to be.”

            “Or we aren’t what the real world wants us to be.” It sounded dumb. Scripted. Overly-hypothetical-philosophical-what-have-you. He felt like a character in a philosophy anecdote – one of the ones by Plato or maybe Aristotle where the student character says a line or two and then Socrates monologues at the poor bastard for three pages.

            But she was nodding along like maybe he said something worth thinking about. He wondered briefly which of them was Socrates. “Yeah. Something like that.” She went back to what she was doing.

            “You still can’t set that equipment up here.”

            “Really?”

            “Yeah.”

            “You sure about that? Cause I’m doing it.”

            “Set it up somewhere else.”

            She looked at him over her shoulder, the corner of her mouth quirked up, “If I wanted to set it up somewhere else, don’t you think I’d be somewhere else?”

            And looking at her he knew right away that there was no way he was going to convince this woman not to do this. They’d argue for hours and she’d set everything up in the meantime and he’d be in trouble no matter what.

            Well fuck that.

            Don’t untangle the Gordian knot, cut it clean through.

            Without putting any extra thought into it, without working this new series of events out to its inevitable conclusion, he glanced at her equipment, zeroed in on the one component the right size and location to be important but portable, grabbed it and took off running. It was long moment between him taking off and her processing exactly what he’d done and her racing after him, tearing at his heels. And she was going to catch him eventually and he was going to catch hell for this, from her, from his boss for causing a scene, from the whole wide world for falling into his twenties full of desperation and no direction but for that moment he was running, clutching something he didn’t understand to his chest and chasing behind him was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in a at least a year.

            Oh yes, he still remembers Diana Kogane. She isn’t – wasn’t – it had been over a decade since her funeral and he still couldn’t think of her as gone, it seemed wrong. He’d seen her grave, thrown in the obligatory fistful of dirt. But…but nothing. She was gone. She just wasn’t the sort of person you could forget.

            His five years in prison he thought of her.

            Prison leaves a lot of room for thinking if you play your cards right. He was a pretty big guy, intimidating. Something about him told people they were better off not messing with him.

            He wondered what she’d think of him now. She’d once told him, eyes unexpectedly sad, _“You’re either going to save the world or burn it to the ground, baby.”_ Well, she was half-right. He just hadn’t managed to burn anything to the ground expect maybe himself.  

            He’d gotten one phone call when he was arrested. But he hadn’t had anyone to call. It had been a few years since the last time he saw her. She’d probably changed her number.

            He was working in a diner now, the kind of greasy roadside place you see in movies but don’t expect to run into in real life. During lulls he pulls a paperback out of his pocket and reads, leaning against the countertop while Mabel files her nails and chatters on the phone like a secretary stereotype straight out of the fifties. She tries to talk to him about her book club sometimes, but they’re always reading some bodice-ripper romance and it makes him a little uncomfortable. He has to bite his tongue on some of his cleverer comments. Mabel’s not built to understand irony or subtle sarcasm.

            He likes when Stacy works – she’s seventeen and comes in after school to help with the afternoon and dinner rush. She’s a good kid, smart. He’ll miss her when she graduates and gets out of this nowhere town – if he’s even still around. He might have taken off by then. He’s got nowhere to go but that doesn’t mean he wants to stay here. She’ll talk about books with him, serious books with weight and heft. She’s always popping her gum and comparing him to fictional characters.

            “You know who you remind me of?”

            “Who?”

            “Shadow from Neil Gaiman’s _American Gods_. You should read it. It’s long, you’ll like it.”

            “If length was all I needed to enjoy a book I’d have a higher opinion of _The Mists of Avalon_.”

            “Just read it, asshole.”

            He lets her call him names, he figures it’s healthy and he doesn’t really care about kids respecting him. It’s not like his age is a sign of any great wisdom, expect maybe a long list of what not to do.

            One day she comes in, and she’s carrying her backpack like usual but when she sees him she frowns.

            “What, kid? Do I have something on my face?”

            “Gimme a sec.” She digs in her backpack and pulls out a book, hardback, but with the dust jacket slightly torn and softened at the edges like she’s been carrying it around a lot. She pages through until she hits what looks like a clump of glossy photo pages in the middle and holds the book up, as if she’s comparing something in there to his face. Her brows are folded together in concentration. He tries to read the cover but it’s too far away and he’s a few years too deep into middle age to have 20/20 vision.

            “Hey, super weird question, but am I crazy or does this kid kind of look like you?” she lowers the book and walks over to the counter, “I mean, I can’t really call him a kid, he’s totally older than me now, but you know how it is.” She slides the book over to him and he’s confronted with something utterly unexpected.

            It’s Diana Kogane. She’s standing behind a teenage kid, an arm slung around his chest, pulling him into a halfway hug, he chin sitting on top of his head, eyes scrunched up in a laugh. She looks older than he remembers her. She’s still beautiful.

            He looks at the date on the photo. Fifteen years since the last time he saw her. It’s been what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years now?

            His mouth is dry. “What’s the book?”

            “It’s a memoir. You know I don’t normally read them. Mostly cuz they’re not exactly ‘targeted at my age demographic’ or whatever,” she’s a teenager, she uses air quotes, “But I saw the title and figured why not? It’s actually really good. It’s about these brothers; their mom was some kind of alien hunter. Kind of one of those stories that’s half funny, half sad and just really _good_ , you know? Anyway, I thought the kid kind of looked like you. Crazy, right? Sorry for bugging you.”

            It’s not so crazy.

            “I knew her,” he finds himself saying, “The woman, that’s the mom?”

            “Uh, yeah, that’s Diana Kogane.”

            “Yeah, I knew her.”

            Stacy stares at him. “Huh.”

            “It was a long time ago.”

            “Okay, dude.”

            And that’s the end of their conversation about the book. But he thinks about it late at night, when he’s all alone, staring at the ceiling and pretending to sleep. He gives up around 2 am and pulls out his laptop, running a search for the only name he can remember – the title of book escapes him at the moment – Diana Kogane.

            And there she is. Her pictures and the book: _The Adventures of Spaceman and the Alien Boy_ , by Takashi Shirogane with an introduction by Keith Kogane.

            He doesn’t know why he does it, but the curling feeling of dread or something in his stomach tells him no even as his hand moves and clicks on the free Amazon preview and he’s reading the first chapter, which is really the introduction.

 _When I was fifteen years old my English teacher told me to write about a fictional character I related to. I was as pissed off as I was pretentious so I picked Pearl from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s_ The Scarlet Letter. _And no, this choice was in no way motivated by that terrible Demi Moore movie. My brother’s editor made me take out my long rant about how wrong that movie was, but suffice to say it’s ridiculous._

            He takes a moment to shake his head at the screen and laugh, a shaky, threadbare thing.

            He opens a new window, not quite ready to read the rest of it, and pulls up Takashi Shirogane’s Wikipedia page. He scrolls down until he hits a mention of Keith Kogane, complete with birth dates. And there it is. Keith Kogane is twenty-eight years old, a professional stage manager living with his husband in upstate New York. Parents are listed as Diana Kogane, father unknown.

            It’s been just short of twenty-nine years since he last saw Diana Kogane. He doesn’t need to count off the months, but he does anyway.

            He has a son. Keith Kogane is his son. _And she never told him._

            He takes a long moment to stare blankly at the screen, the impersonal details; the offer from Wikipedia to ‘Edit This Information!’. He has a wild impulse, a sudden urge to edit the goddamn page, to add his name in somewhere, to scream, through zeroes and ones, that he was part of this story; that he was there for some of it.

            But he wasn’t. Not really. And that burns like a lump of dry ice in his stomach.

            He stares at the screen until it goes dark, goes to sleep like he should have. He can’t decide if he wants to buy the damn book. He can’t decide what to do.

            What do you do when you’ve been written out of nearly thirty years of history?

            He stares at the dark screen and remembers Diana Kogane and wonders, over and over again on endless loop ‘why, why, why?’

…

            When Keith was eighteen he threatened to go on an epic roadtrip vision quest to find his father instead of going to college, despite the fact that he’d been accepted to both NYU and Columbia (shocking, really, considering he didn’t acutally _have_ a transcript from his freshman year of high school and he’d spent the first semester of sophomore year passive-aggressively aceing biology and equally passive-aggressively failing everything else). He and Shiro had been fighting more and more as senior year wound down and graduation loomed closer and closer. Keith could feel the future pressing against his ribcage, swelling up inside him like spray-foam insulation, expanding, expanding, expanding and crushing all his internal organs as it went. He’d been fighting with Shiro more and more just to have something to fight against. He couldn’t punch looming adulthood in the face, but he and Shiro could snarl and snap at each other until they couldn’t bear to breathe the same air.

            He’d thrown out the suggestion in the middle of an argument, an exclamation point before storming out and climbing the fire escape up to the roof and sitting there, sulking in the clinging, damp pre-spring air.

            _“Hell, maybe I’ll spend all my savings on a shitty car and drive around the desert looking for my deadbeat dad! Which do you think I’ll find first, him or mom’s fucking aliens? Mom couldn’t find either so if I get one I’ll at least be doing better than her!”_

The words’ residue lay like a thin skin of curdled milk against the back of his throat and he wasn’t sure why exactly he regretted them so utterly, but they felt like poison against his teeth.

            Shiro followed him up to the roof because Shiro was too good sometimes; he tried too hard.

            They sat shoulder to shoulder and Keith tried not to hate anyone. He tried to not hate Shiro for loving him for no good goddamn reason. He tried not to hate himself for not being worth that kind of caring. He tried not to hate his mother for making him this way. He tried not to hate his father for being fucking nonexistent.

            “Is that what you really want?” Shiro finally asked, words uncertain and almost painfully gentle. Keith wondered if he’d practiced that tone before climbing up here. “Do you really want to try to find your father?”

            Keith sighed, “No.”

            “Then why did you say it?”

            Keith shook his head as if he could shake out every thought in his skull, lay them out before him and arrange them just so – until they made sense again, “Because that’s what I should want, isn’t? Aren’t people supposed to want to know where they come from? Who they are? All that coming-of-age-story bullshit?”

            Shiro tipped his head to the side, “Are they?”

            “I don’t know!” The words exploded out of Keith’s chest, tearing him open as they went, “All I know is Mom didn’t ‘find herself ‘ or whatever before she did the conventional college thing and somehow that messed her up so much she had to spend the rest of her life trying to do it all over again, but it was too late and she got stuck or something. I don’t know. And then you did the whole find-yourself shtick and look at you, you’re… _you_. What if I don’t and I end up like _her_? I’m supposed to want to know who my family is, to understand my past and everything…aren’t I supposed to want to go and find my father?”

            Shiro stared at him and shook his head, “Buddy…I think you’ve been watching too many indie movies.”

            Keith tried to scoff at his brother, but it’s also startled a laugh out of him so what came out as a congested tangle of sound capped off with a sad little sniffle. He was crying, but not the tears of someone who wants or expects any kind of comfort. They’re long, silent tears, making a break for it, escaping his eyes like convicts fleeing prison in the night.

            “Oh, kiddo,” Shiro somehow understood, despite the fact that Keith knew he wasn’t making any sense. But then Shiro was there, gathering Keith up in his arms, hugging him close and safe, “What do _you_ want?”

            “I don’t want to end up like Mom,” Keith choked out into Shiro’s shirt.

            “Then don’t be.”

            “It’s not that simple.”

            “Yeah, it is. You’re Keith, she was Diana. You’re two different people. You’re already not the same. Your future’s up to you. Don’t do something just because you think you should want to. Do you want to know who your father is?”

            Silence as Keith considered, even though he already knew the answer, “If I meet him, no matter what, I lose.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Either he’s an asshole and I know I’m blood-related to an asshole til the end of time, or he’s a good guy who never knew about me and I spend the rest of my life knowing I missed out on years of having a good dad. Either way I lose.”

            “Okay,” Shiro’s voice was measured, even, “Do you feel…incomplete? Not having a father?”

            A long moment and then a very soft, slightly guilty “No.”

            “Okay.”

            “I already know who I am. I don’t need…I know who I am. Right now. But…shouldn’t I want to - ?”

            Shiro sighed, “Here’s a tip, kiddo. Don’t do shit just because you think you should.”

            “Okay.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Yeah.”

            And that was the last time Keith ever seriously considered trying to find his father. His father hasn’t been on his radar for years. He’s fine with it; he’s never felt like he’s missing anything or like he needs to connect with the past.

            He knows who he is. He’s happy.

…

            When Keith is twenty-eight there’s a knock on the door. It’s not an extraordinary morning. Lance forgot his lunch accidentally-on-purpose because he knows if he does Keith will bring it by the Community Center and they can have lunch together. He hasn’t seemed to figure out that he could just ask to meet up for lunch instead of this elaborate and incredibly obvious ruse. Keith must find it endearing or something because he plays along every single damn time. If he had any sense at all he’d leave Lance’s forgotten lunch behind and teach him a lesson about direct communication and not being forgetful and all those adult things they only pretend they’re good at.

            But he doesn’t because Keith is gullible and doesn’t like eating lunch alone nearly as much as he pretends he does.

            Keith is on the phone when he hears the knock on the door. It’s the director on the other end of the line and they want things to happen and the scenic designer is texting him things _she_ wants to happen and the technical director just emailed him about all the things that _aren’t_ happening and it’s been a busy morning. He hears the knock on the door and assumes that it’s Pidge forgetting her keys or Matt wanting to sneak into Pidge’s lab via the dumbwaiter or maybe Hunk with some of the muffins he made yesterday. He yells something vaguely placating at the door; wraps up his call with the director, and grabs both lunches, his messenger bag, and his travel mug. He’s so distracted he’s almost forgotten about the knocking until he opens the door and sees a face both familiar and completely foreign. Almost like…seeing a celebrity in real life. It’s someone you’ve been programmed to recognize but can’t really process in a real-world context.

            Except he’s only seen this man once, from a distance, at his mother’s funeral, and a few dozen times in her stories when she was feeling warm and loose and nostaligic enough to sketch him out with rough, ill-fitting, too-casual words.

            He still recognizes him, in a way.

            Keith can feel his eyes narrow and his metaphorical hackles rise.

            “Uh, Hey. Do you know who I am?” The stranger-not-stranger says.

            Keith’s not proud of what he says next. “You’d better be dying or something equally Hallmark or this reunion is a waste of my time.”

            An eyebrow quirks in a familiar way and Keith wonders if his mother stole that facial expression from this man or if he borrowed it from her or if they made it together, like a beta-test version of Keith himself. “So, judging from the overt hostility I’d say she either told you too much or not enough about me.”

            Keith cannot handle this, he hasn’t felt this furious and out of control since he was an angry fifteen year old all alone against the world. “Get the fuck off my porch,” he snaps and slams the door shut.

            On the other side, safely confined to his house’s entryway, he throttles back a scream as too many feelings build up like fizz in a violently shaken soda, like lava in a dormant volcano, freshly disturbed. Hands shaking, breath rasping against his throat, too fast and too rough like sandpaper, he drops his things and throws all his strength and rage and panic and fury into a single punch to the wall.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “...A little ditty ‘bout Jack and Diane, two American kids growin’ up in the heartland…saying oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone…” 
> 
> The past and the present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH MY GOODNESS, THANK YOU EVERYONE  
> You all are the best and so inspiring and thank you so much for all your support. 
> 
> So...how about that chapter summary...yeah, John Cougar Mellencamp lyrics are reeeally descriptive, I know. Sorry about that. Do listen to 'Jack and Diane' though, after you read this chapter. I will admit, I wasn't thinking of the song when I picked these character names...but having re-listened to the song it's kind of mournfully ironic and weirdly appropriate here. 
> 
> Anyway, that was vague. So this is a bit of a filler chapter, but it has some Diana POV and some Lance and some (former) interns, AND some Thace (because he keeps sneaking into my fics somehow?). So I'm pretty happy with it. Plus, you know, all that messy feelings stuff. There's some of that too.

**Chapter 2**

_Past_

            The last time Diana Kogane went home – for a given value of the word, nowhere had felt like ‘home’ to her, not for years and years, every place like a piece of clothing you try on in the store but don’t end up buying because it’s too loose or too tight or too expensive or the cheap fluorescent lights highlight everything wrong with your body and you can’t bear to do anything good for it after that. The last time Diana Kogane went home, Keith had just turned one and his father had been gone for almost two years. It was her parents’ Christmas party in their pretty little suburban house in their pretty little suburban neighborhood. They’d had it every year since before she could remember, the holiday seasons of her childhood always punctuated with this single night, wreathed in the heavy scent of gingerbread and cinnamon. She could still feel the rough tulle underskirts of her girlhood Christmas dresses under her hands. She could still hear her little sister calling _“Twirl, ‘Ana, twirl, twirl!”_ as her little voice fell away into a torrent of giggles and clapping. She could still hear her older sister telling them to sit still and straight and behave in front of their parents’ grown-up friends and not to spill anything on their clothes.

            She’d always had her older sister’s last-year dress and her little sister had always known that Diana’s dress would be _her_ next-year dress and that was the way of things.

            The holiday season always tasted like fruit punch and crumbly homemade peppermint cookies afterwards. Even the desert sands and relentless sun weren’t quite enough to chase away the December feeling that her fingers should be finding velvet and tulle and pretty things and sneaking as many cookies as possible.

            She used to make up wild and strange and occasionally gory and gruesome stories about the gingerbread people to entertain her little sister and the other children who would gather in her corner to hear her ghoulish tales until her mother or one of her aunts caught her mid-red-frosting-bloodbath and chased away her audience before confiscating the cookies. When they were older it had been her elder sister who did the chasing and the confiscating, always topped off with a testy _“Diana, haven’t you grown out of this yet?”_

            Her older sister had a bad case of wanting to be their mother. Then again, her younger sister had a bad case of wanting to be Diana, and that wasn’t much better.

            Diana hadn’t been to the Christmas party in years. The last time (before the actual last time) had been when Shiro was four-almost-five and the cracks were just beginning to form in what had been her marriage. Or maybe the cheap filling that they’d stuffed in the cracks between them before the wedding was finally just giving up the ghost and falling away.

            God, she hated these Christmas parties.

            But she went, that year, that last time. She didn’t know why, she just woke up one morning, peppermint on her tongue and salt in the corners of her eyes. She’d lain in bed and curled around herself as water spilled from her eyes like a leaking faucet. She wasn’t crying; there were no hitching breaths, no sobs, no stuffed-up nose and red eyes. This almost felt…pure. Like maybe there was just too much water in her body so her eyes were giving some up until she could feel clean and empty again. Polished smooth like an abalone shell.

            If she closed her eyes she could almost feel a marker sliding over her skin. He’d loved to steal her Sharpies; she’d starting buying them in huge packs of rainbow colors just for him. (but she never told him they were for him, that was part of the game, the play-pretend of loving but never being ‘in love’). He’d draw enormous sprawling dreamscapes on her back in sweeping strokes and excruciating detail and every image was perfect and in those long lazy moments as he worked her mind would wander and she could almost see how it all fit together, the shape of the universe itself, and she’d feel like a star, like the mote of space dust she really was, a piece of the infinite cosmos. And then he’d finish the picture and the spell would be broken and it would all seem ridiculous that she’d ever thought she’d felt that way at all.

            But she’d woken up that morning and water had escaped her eyes in endless dripping-faucet streams and she’d decided to go home. To try to reconcile where she came from with where she was now. Keith had started crying in the travel crib in the main room of the RV and she’d known she was going to go ‘home’.

            It was strange seeing snow. It snuck up on her on the drive north, creeping in on the edges of the landscape like frost on a windowpane and she was suddenly reminded of a conversation once, how he’d told her in his slow, sandpaper drawl that he’d never seen snow. She’d told him he wasn’t missing much and he’d asked her how the hell could she know that in a voice that was half laughter, half wonder, like he was genuinely surprised and delighted she thought she could predict his reaction to snow, of all things. It should have been patronizing. Instead it was just funny.

            She parked her battered, desert-dusted truck on the street outside her parents’ house and gathered up her son and her duffle bag and walked inside, easy as anything. Like she was always supposed to be there.

            (She wasn’t, she knew she wasn’t, she wasn’t wearing a nice dress, she was wearing the jeans that made her ass look good and the leather jacket that was all clean sharp lines and angles and glinting silver zippers.)

            Keith cuddled close to her chest and stared at everything with wide stormcloud eyes. A whole roomful of well-dressed, half-recognizable people stared back, coonversation trickling to a halt in the face of them.

            Keith was a smart little thing, already talking in halting syllables, parroting back whatever Diana said to him like it was gospel. Shiro called them every weekend and after he was done telling her all about his school days and neighborhood friends in a breathless, windblown voice (like he was trying too hard to make it normal, like he thought she might run away if he didn’t make every single word relevant and interesting, not realizing every word was a blunt fingertip drumming at the bruise of her betrayal, the knowledge that she ruined this, that she hurt her baby and that she couldn’t make anything right) he’d talk to Keith. He never used babytalk on his little brother. For all Diana could tell, he told Keith the exact same things he told her, just slower. His words to Keith were measured, evenly spaced, expressive and perfectly pronounced. There was a chance Takashi was doing better teaching Keith to speak than she was. She didn’t know if she should be proud or ashamed and instead just felt sullenly, guiltily irritated.

            So when all those eyes, hard eyes, soft eyes, foreign, well-groomed, normal, ‘nice’ eyes turned their unwelcoming way, Keith stared them all down. He had his father’s eyes and his father’s way of looking at the whole world, taking it all in at once, distilling it down in his core.

            And when all those suburbanites stared at them like they were something escaped from a zoo, little baby Keith said, loud and clear, “Mama, aliens. Aliens, Mama.”

…

            Fourteen years later not a single person at that Christmas party offered to take Keith in when Diana died. His grandparents pretended they’d never met and he believed them.

…

_Present_

            Keith stares at his hand, at the thin trickles of blood escaping his torn knuckles, at the small dent in the wall. Who knew walls were so durable? Keith didn’t. He’s never punched a wall before, he was more used to the feeling of a real fight, one with humans and hitting back.

            He’s distantly glad he won’t have to explain a hole in the wall to anybody. The cuts on his knuckles don’t really occur to him. The ache in his hand is probably bruising but that doesn’t feel real, doesn’t feel relevant to the boiling over cauldron of emotions lodged in his chest. He can’t… he just…can’t.

            But he has to go to work and his problems are all on the porch so he does the only thing he can think to do and walks out the back door. He forgets to grab his things, but he does remember to lock the door behind him as he goes. It’s the little things, you know?

            He isn’t sure what to do next, so he walks to work.

…

**EX-INTERN GROUP CHAT**

**Lord of the Dance (Farid):** Okay, so is anyone talking about the fact that Keith’s late to work?

**Adela:** He’s not late; he’s just not early. We’ve been conditioned to expect him to be here way earlier than he’s supposed to be.

**Alyssa:** He’s totally late.

**Tony:** Seriously???? I WAS EARLY TODAY. #betrayed

**Adela:** You’re not #betrayed, you’re #doing-your-fucking-job

**Lord of the Dance (Farid):** Now you’re #burned

**Alyssa:** wtf is with all the hastags?

**Tony:** #done-with-this

**Adela:** Tony’s a #diva

**Tony:** And Keith is #late-to-work

**Lord of the Dance (Farid):** I’m #disturbed, personally

**Alyssa:** okay, guys, drop the hashtags, I’m actually super worried now. What if something’s wrong? Is Lance okay? Are the cats?

**Tony:** …keith could have worked himself into a coma again…

**Alyssa:** NOT COMFORTING, TONY

**Adela:** Okay, now I’m freaked out…a little…I’m a little freaked out

**Lord of the Dance (Farid):** Chill, y’all, I’m texting Theatre Mom

**Adela:** Just call him Lance, you nerd

**Lord of the Dance (Farid):** Shh, texting now

**Adela:** …

**Tony:** …

**Alyssa:** …

**Adela:** WELL???

**Lord of the Dance (Farid):** Ok, he doesn’t know anything either and I may have freaked him out by asking

**Adela:** FARID

**Lord of the Dance (Farid):** I’M SORRY, OKAY?

**Alyssa:** This family is a disaster

**Tony:** Am I the only one seriously worried Kogane is unconscious in a ditch somewhere?

**Adela:** NOT HELPING, TONY

…

            Keith gets to work. It takes longer than expected. He’s not used to walking the whole way. It’s doable but…lengthy. He’s not expecting the former interns to all be huddled in his office, looking pensive, either. He frowns at them from the doorway and they frown at him and there’s a long moment where no one moves.

            Then Adela blinks and Alyssa breaks the silence with a startled, “What did you do to your hand?”

            Keith shrugs and looks at it. It’s not pretty. A strange, abstract pattern of dried blood swirls and whorls across his skin and gathers crustily in the bowl of his palm. He looks back at the children, who are staring fretfully at him. “Nothing, it’s nothing. Shouldn’t you be working?”

            “You’re bleeding!” Tony states the obvious as loudly as possible yet still manages to be wrong.

            “Not anymore,” Keith shrugs, setting his cell phone on his desk. It and his keys are the only things he brought to work today. There are little spots of dried blood on the case. “It stopped awhile ago. Now get out of my office and do your actual jobs.”

            They trade looks over Keith’s head and he rolls his eyes at them and leaves to wash his knuckles in the bathroom sink. Everything – this morning, the stranger on the porch – everything seems oddly far away and distant. He feels totally normal now. A little irritated at the children for acting like such… _interns_ but nothing more. This morning was a very strange dream, this moment is a very strange dream; it’s all very strange indeed.

            He thinks of Alice in Wonderland as he watches dried blood turn liquid again and trace patterns against the porcelain of the sink bowl as it swirls down the drain.

            _“But I don’t want to go among mad people”_

            He tries to clean the frayed skin without re-opening the wounds. Everything seems both very far away and very clear all at once.

            _“We’re all mad here.”_

            He shuts off the water, dries off his hands, and goes back to work.

…

            “Okay, I’m calling Lance,” Farid says as they shuffle out of Keith’s office. Adela and Tony had paused, considering staying and demanding answers, but he and Alyssa managed to hustle them out eventually.

            “Probably a good idea,” Adela sighs, “I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with him.”

            “He’s never done anything like this before,” Alyssa says, her voice soft.

            “What? Come in looking like he’s been in a bar fight?” Tony scoffs, “No, not really Mr. Professional’s style.”

            “Tony, can you please stop acting like the estranged son in a historical drama for five seconds?” Adela sighs. Farid has drifted off; voice a soft murmur as he explains things to Lance.

            Tony runs an uncomfortable hand thorugh his hair and mumbles an apology. Adela rolls her eyes but accepts it.

            “Maybe it’s nothing, maybe he just hit his hand on something and didn’t have time to clean it before he left? Maybe it started bleeding again on the way here? Maybe…maybe it’s all nothing,” Alyssa offers uncertainly.

            Tony surprises them both but throwing an arm around her shoulders and leaning his temple against Adela’s head. “Sure, maybe it’s nothing.”

            Adela pats his back and doesn’t say anything.

…

_Present – elsewhere_

            That…could have gone better. He figures he probably shouldn’t clutter up his son’s (god, his _son_ , what…what did that even _mean_ at this point?) front porch, so he decamps to a coffee shop down the road. He buys a black coffee in an unpronounceable size and settles into a table for two in the far corner of the shop and wonders what to do next. At a loss, he sips his mediocre corporate coffee and calls his former parole officer.

            _“What now?”_

            “Hello to you too.”

            _“I cannot fathom how you have failed to grasp this until now, but we are not friends.”_

“You still take my calls, don’t you?”

            _“Under duress. Ulaz seems to be under the impression you will suffer a horrific relapse and topple back into a life of crime if left to your own devices. I pointed out your original life of crime was actually far more financially rewarding and far better suited to your unique talents than slinging hash at a diner ever will be.”_

“And I’m sure Mr. Ulaz was very disappointed in you for saying such a horrible thing,” he drawls.

            Thace sounds unimpressed. _“Just tell me your problem so I can call you names and you can hang up on me in a huff.”_

“See? We are friends.”

            _“I hate every minute of this forced interaction,”_ Thace says flatly (and falsely).

            “I met my son today,” he says, bluntly. He doesn’t know how to make it sound prettier or better or nicer. And anyway, Thace prefers radical honesty.

            _“I wasn’t aware you had progeny.”_

“I wasn’t aware you had to use as many SAT words in a sentence as possible to get your point across. Do you keep a thesaurus around just to talk to me?”

            _“No. How did you come by a son?”_

“The usual way.”

            _“How enlightening.”_

He realizes he’s being an ass but he’s tired and he’s pissed off at the world and there’s an empty part of him that misses people, real people, people he had a connection to, people he cared about. There’s a part of him that’s still missing Diana Kogane, even after all these years. “I just found out about him a few days ago. He’s…he’s twenty-eight and his mom was the love of my fucking life, and she never told me about him.”

            Thace doesn’t seem to know what to say about this. _“Does he need legal representation?”_ he finally attempts, _“because Ulaz would be willing to help with that. He thinks we’re all friends.”_

            “We are friends, you cold-blooded bastard.”

            _“How unfortunate.”_

“And no, he’s…he’s a great kid. Shit, not a kid, just…a normal goddamn person. Happy. I guess.”

            Thace sighs. He sounds tired. Every now and then it’s obvious how much he cares and how much this job is killing him. _“What do you need to hear, Jack?”_

Jack. It’s his name, sort of. It’s the name he uses. Not the name he was born with, but that’s okay. He’s worn this one for most of his adult life and it fits just like a pair of boots that weren’t meant for his feet, but time and wear has broken them into the close to the proper shape anyway.

            “I need to know how to deal with this. I want to know my kid, but I don’t think he wants to know me. And I can’t force him to.”

            _“You realize I have no experience with children?”_

            “I know, but you’re the closest thing I have to a goddamn friend these days so I called you. Sorry about that.”

            Thace sighs. He was a good parol officer. He’s tough but fair. Former military. Jack’s managed to weasel some of his story out of him over the years and it’s pretty standard-issue in a sad way. Rich family with full pockets and narrow minds, a rebellious kid who gets disowned at age eighteen and joins the marines for lack of better options, gets out of the military eventually and falls into local law enforcement because it turns out that’s one of the few things he knows how to do. Jack’s never been able to entirely puzzle out where Ulaz, genteel, dignified Ulaz who wears both his medical degree and law degree with the same kind of casual ease that Jack wears his battered canvas coat, fits into Thace’s story. He just knows they’re in this together, whatever ‘this’ is these days.

            And it’s true – they are the closest things Jack has to friends.

            _“He’s an adult. If he does not want to see you, he won’t. But don’t leave town just yet. If you give up now you’ll just confirm every terrible thing he’s ever thought about you. Wait. His curiosity might win him over; he might seek you out. Or he might not. That’s the way things are.”_

Jack exhales, the air hard and sharp against his lungs. “You’re right, damn you.”

            _“I tend to be irritating that way, yes.”_

“Thanks, Thace.”

            _“I’ll let Ulaz know you haven’t fallen into a life of crime and depravity.”_

“Good of you.”

            _“Hmph.”_

…

            Keith has fallen out of the habit of bandaging split knuckles – it’s been nearly a decade since he’s hit anything bare-knuckles with any kind of force. Finally giving up on the snarled knot of bandaids he’s amassed, he chucks the sticky, gauzy lump in the trash and just wraps his hand in a wad of papertowels and calls it good.

            The former interns have vacated his office when he returns and he exhales a tight sigh of relief, powering up his desktop computer and settling into his office chair. The computer fan makes a small, protesting noise and he hums back at it, irritated. He wonders absently if Pidge or Hunk would be willing to take a look at it over the weekend.

            Everything feels very ordinary.

            Keith feels wrapped in gauze.

            He pulls up his browser and selects the gmail icon. He lets his vision go vague and fuzzy as he waits for the page to load and suddenly finds his eye caught on the dropbox icon on his toolbar. Not sure why he does it, Keith runs his cursor over it, opening the application. He clicks through his folders until he hits upon the one he’d been looking for (without allowing himself to acknowledge he was looking for it).

            He pulls up the first video and turns down the sound until it’s just a distant buzz, the images flickering across the small box on his screen background noise as he returns to his email.

…

            When Lance sees Keith he regrets not calling Shiro. Keith looks, to put it kindly, like shit. His hair is ruffled strangely, like he’s been outside in the wind but hasn’t bothered to put himself back in order since coming in from the weather. He’s got a wad of paper towels wrapped around one hand and his mouth is a thin, hard line. His face looks carved out of stone, like he’s a marble man in a museum, unreachable, perfect in his distance.

            Lance hates it.

            “Babe,” he says softly, coming around to look over Keith’s shoulder, “Whatcha doing?”

            “Work. The usual,” Keith’s voice is tired and a little toneless, like he tried for surprise but couldn’t fully muster up the energy to emote.

            Lance nods, peering at Keith’s screen. That does indeed look like an Excel spreadsheet. “What’s the video?”

            Keith blinks and tips his head, not fully turning to look at Lance, more slipping a glance at him over his shoulder, “Why are you here?”

            “Can I touch you?”

            A furrow presses between Keith’s brows, “Why would you need to ask?”

            “You seem a little…off, baby.” Lance lays gentle fingertips against the back of his neck.

            But the ‘baby’ seems to have put Keith on alert, he spooks away from the touch like a startled animal, sliding his chair back and looking up at Lance with big, confused eyes, “What’s wrong?”

            “Why don’t you tell me?” Lance says it kindly but it’s got Keith’s hackles up.

            “Nothing is wrong with me, why are you calling me that?”

            “Calling you what?”

            “You know what,” Keith snaps and he snaps his chair back around to fully face the computer and blindly clicks on a window, presumably wanting his internet browser, and instead pulls the video file to the forefront. “Oh shit,” he mutters under his breath, but doesn’t click away.

            “Is that you mom?” Lance asks, voice still soft, as gentle as possible.

            It is Keith’s mom, he recognizes her from all the photographs Keith and Shiro pulled out of storage for the book. She’s setting up some kind of apparatus and talking at the camera, casual, candid, like this is some kind of video log. He can only really decipher every third word of what she’s saying, Keith has the volume way down and there’s some background noise from the desert wind. Her dark hair is pulled back in a fluffy ponytail – it thrashes in the wind like a wild thing. There are streaks of purple and blue in her hair- the purple is newer than the blue. The blue’s begun to grow out and turn that nasty teal color blue dyes turn if not refreshed. Her nails are painted some dark color and a tattoo peeks out where her t-shirt rides up over her hipbone. She talks with her hands, direct, focused gestures like Keith, like each motion is a declarative statement of its very own.

            “Yeah, it’s my mom,” Keith says, and his voice is tight.

            Lance looks down at him, at the way Keith’s mouth turns down at the corners. “What happened today?”

            Keith shakes his head and drums the fingers of his paper-towel-free hand against the desktop. “Why do you think she didn’t tell me about him? Not even a name. All I got were…descriptors. Fucking adjectives. Useless.”

            “Okay, I’m gonna have to argue with that one, I myself am very fond of adjectives.”

            “Did she not want me to go looking for him? Why didn’t she tell me anything?”

            “Babe, I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know what you’re even talking about.”

            Keith suddenly twists his head around, tendons in his neck straining as he stares Lance straight in the eye, “Lance. If she barely told me anything about _him_ …what did she tell him about _me_?”

            Lance shrugs, he feels so helpless pinned under that intense gaze. Keith may think adjectives are useless but Lance will never run out of descriptors for Keith’s eyes. They’re the color thunderheads, of oncoming storms, purple-grey-black-indigo. “I don’t know,” is all he has to offer.

            Keith blinks, long and slow. “I met my dad today.”

            “What?”

            “He showed up…and I don’t know what to do next.”

            “Holy shit.”

            “I know.”

…

_Past_

            An hour into the last Christmas party, Diana escaped outside with Keith in her arms. It was snowing, flakes spiraling down like powdered sugar. Keith reached out little starfish hands, trying to catch the fluttering ice dust, eyes and mouth wide with wonder.

            “You’ve never seen snow before, huh, babydoll?” she asked, kissing his cheek and cuddling him close.

            He made a few sounds that might be words someday, when he’s a little older, and she rested her cheek gently against the crown of his head, his wool hat rough on her skin.

            She rocked them back and forth humming nonsense, twisting her head up and watching the snow falling, trying to trace each flake’s path from the clouds. “Your dad had never seen snow either, babydoll. I wonder if he has by now.”

            Keith blinked at her, “Da?”

            “Yeah. Yeah, that guy.” she kissed his forehead, “That guy.”

            “Hmm,” Keith sounded dubious, but went back to trying to catch the snow.

            Diana began to hum again, this time with a tune in mind, the lyrics a little fuzzy in her head, “ _A little ditty ‘bout Jack and Diane, two American kids growin’ up in the heartland…saying oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone…”_

            They stayed outside a while longer, getting cold and watching the snow.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little sketch of mine (sorry I'm a pretty mediocre artist!) of Diana Kogane: https://deerstalkerdeathfrisbee.tumblr.com/image/159023919047


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To: Shi-bro  
> Text Keith  
> Call Keith  
> Smoke-signal Keith  
> Communicate with your little bro stat
> 
> To: Lance  
> What’s going on?
> 
> To: Shi-bro  
> His dad showed up  
> On our porch  
> This morning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for all the support this fic/series has received!!! 
> 
> Also, YOU GUESSED IT, THIS ISN'T GOING TO BE AS SHORT AS I THOUGHT. Nothing is ever as short as I hope. There will be more chapter(s). Not sure how many. This fic mutated and struck out on its own in a multitude of directions. Also, I'm weak for flashback scenes. 
> 
> Haha, I've been in tech week hell recently and haven't been able to update *anything* until now. So, here, have this chapter I accidentally filled with broganes angst, I'm sure that's exactly what you signed up for when you subscribed to this series, right??? (I kid, but really, this took an unexpected turn here). I'm actually, low-key weirdly anxious about this chapter. I haven't updated anything in the past week and I'm kind of worried about whether or not this chapter is any good? Ugh. Writer problems. 
> 
> Anyway, I sincerely hope you enjoy this angst fest. 
> 
> Also, p.s. this song came up on one of my Pandora stations and I just immediately decided it was the theme song of this fic/Keith and Jack's relationship. Check out the song 'Heirloom' by Sleeping at Last, it is THE theme song for Jack and Keith in this 'verse.

**Chapter 3**

_Present_

            Jack still has all his sketchbooks from before; hell, he still has that damned portfolio. Most of it’s mouldering away in a storage unit in Phoenix he still pays for but hasn’t seen in person for years. He’d considered destroying them, burning them, tossing them in some anonymous dumster in a back alley somewhere but he hasn’t and he won’t, he knows that much.

            The last sketchbook, the half-filled one, sits in his duffle bag at his feet as he sips his third cup of mediocre coffee from his coffee shop corner, watching as the day passes in front of him. He doesn’t know what to do; he hadn’t planned this far ahead. He’s not sure what his next step is. Thace’s advice was good enough in theory, but lacked a certain right-now practicality.

            So he sips his coffee and thinks about the half-empty sketchbook and his son and what we leave behind.

            Jack had never wanted to leave much of anything behind. He’d tried for so long to be a nothing, a non-entity, like a desert wind, something that only exists in the right now when you’re experiencing it, but vanishes from your awareness the moment it passes. Or something like that. Jack might have been almost an artist once upon a time, but that doesn’t mean he was ever a poet.

            (He still thinks about drawing things sometimes – mostly people, but every time he tries it comes out wrong, and not in an impressionistic so-wrong-it’s-right way, just wrong in a wrong way.)

            His fingernails scratch against the cardboard of the cup, too loud in the mid-morning lull. He’s had too much caffeine; he can feel it, a buzzing beneath his skin, a flickering muscle-twitch under his right eye.

            His hands itch.

            He could draw right now, he thinks. He could take out the half-empty sketchbook and maybe…

            Fuck. He’s being ridiculous. What would he even draw? What is there left of his style? He hasn’t done any of his own artwork in years. Hell, it’s vain to think he even had a ‘style’ in the first place.

            He takes another sip of coffee and imagines the buzzing underneath his skin intensifies.

…

            “What do you want to do?”

            Keith blinks, long and slow, at the question. “I don’t know.”

            “How can I help?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Keith…”

            “I don’t know,” Keith snaps, jumping to his feet explosively and pacing the room. His office has never seemed so small and confining before.

            The barest flicker of hurt dances across Lance’s face and Keith feels a twist of guilt but keeps pacing.

            “Babe…”

            Keith huffs and shakes his head, stopping in his trackes momentarily, “No, sorry, this idiotic.” He runs a hand down his face and twitches, surprised when a clump of bloody paper towels falls away from his torn knuckles. “I need to get a grip. I’m a grown man, with a fucking job to do, I don’t have time for…daddy issues,” he cuts a glance over to where Lance is now leaning against his desk, watching him with creased brow and fretful eyes.

            “It’s okay to be upset about this, Keith.”

            But Keith shakes his head, a single sharp twist, “No, it’s fine. Lance, go back to work, I don’t know why the interns called you.”

            “You know exactly why the interns called me, you dumbass! You showed up to work bleeding in some kind of weird fugue state!”

            Keith huffs, exasperated, the animal inside is trying to claw its way up his throat but he won’t let it, he chokes it back, and says, “They’re young, they’re excitable. They saw a little blood and overreacted.”

            “Oh don’t you pull this robot-man-I-have-no-feelings shit on me, Keith!” Lance snaps, control finally breaking, standing and striding over to get in his husband’s face. Something electric crackles and snaps between them and it’s not like the fun times when they’re in each other’s space, tension humming between their bodies like a live-wire current, this is biting, stinging electricity, the kind they warn people away from, “I _know_ you. You think you’re so…inscructable, so _mysterious_ and _badass_. Lone-wolf Keith who doesn’t need anyone or anything, especially not something as small and messy as feelings. But _I know you_. And I know there’s a lot going on in your head right now and none of it makes sense so you’re just boxing it all up and putting it away, _like you do_ because You. Are. An. Idiot sometimes. Just…please, just _talk to me_.”

            Keith feels a lump of something hard and cold turning in his chest. There’s a block of ice lodged right under his breastbone. “What is there to say?” his voice is cold like the frost on his bones, “My father showed up on my front porch this morning. After twenty-eight _fucking years._ I don’t know what he wants, I don’t know why he’s here, _I don’t even know his name_. I _do_ know that when my mother _died_ when I was fifteen _no one wanted me_ and no one could even _find_ him.”

            “That’s not true,” Lance’s voice is soft, second-cousin to a whisper, “Shiro wanted you.”

            Keith barks a laugh and it feels like sandpaper against his throat, “You think a twenty-three-year-old war vet wants a half-feral ‘problem child’ dumped on his lap? Really? He kept me because he’s Shiro and he’s convinced he has to do the right fucking thing everything single time even if it kills him. It almost did kill him once. And I, being a selfish, inconsiderate, _bastard_ – literally, isn’t that funny – _let him_. I _wanted_ him to come for me, even though, stupid kid though I was; I knew what it would mean for him to make that sacrifice. I wanted him to make it anyway.”

            “Stop that; Shiro loves you, he’s your _brother._ ”

            Keith shakes his head, he imagines he can feel his brain move as he does, he imagines he can feel it, swimming in its own juices in the cage of his skull, “You’ve said it yourself – you don’t think you could have done the same thing Shiro did. And you _love_ Andie and Sofie. You’re their brother. Shiro _shouldn’t have come for me_. He didn’t deserve that burden. But you know who did? You know whose fucking job it was to make sure I wasn’t alone in the foster system getting the shit beat out of me every day because I was the freak who believed in aliens, who wasn’t like the other kids? My _father_. He put me on this planet, he’s halfway responsible, he should have stepped the fuck up. But he didn’t.”

            “Keith, baby…” Lance’s voice is still soft, but it has the ragged edge of empathy and Keith can barely stand it. His eyes are wet and he hates that too.

            “What does he _want_?” he asks, voice fading on the end, begging for an answer, “What the hell does he want from me?”

            “Oh baby, come here,” Lance folds him into a hug, pulling him in close and tight, pressing light kisses to the side of his head, “I don’t know, I’m sorry but I don’t. I wish I could tell you, I do. Shh, it’s okay, I love you, I’m here.”

…

_Past_

            Growing up, Shiro sometimes thought he might care more about discovering who Keith’s father was than Keith did. But he couldn’t help it, he had to know, he felt the hole of it in his brain, the empty space of not-knowing. It chewed at his thoughts and worried at his dreams.

            “Mom, I need to know who he is.”

            “No, you don’t. It’s none of your business.”

            “But Mom, what if he comes back? What if he tries to take Keith away?”

            “Takashi, no, that’s – ”

            “It could happen, I’ve seen it on tv. He could try to take Keith away! Mom! This is important!”

            “This is ridiculous, no one is going to try to take your brother away. Especially not his father.”

            “You don’t know that. Come on, Mom, I have to know his name so I can get Keith back if he takes him away while I’m not here!”

            “Why are you so worried about this? It’s got nothing to do with you.”

            “Because it’s my baby brother. I love him and I promised I’d protect him from everything and always keep him safe and look out for him. Rescuing him if he needs rescusing is part of the big-brother deal.”

            She never did tell him, though. But Keith’s father never tried to take Keith away, and Shiro eventually grew out of thinking the plots of soap operas translated directly into real life.

            Later, when Shiro was older, the summer he was seventeen, he tried again for new reasons and got the same old answers.

            “Mom, enough, just tell me who Keith’s dad is. It’s not that big of a deal.”

            “Why do you want to know?”

            “Because I’m gonna be eighteen soon, I’ll be…in college, or traveling, or I don’t even know.”

            “So it won’t matter.”

            “No, it will because I won’t always be around, Mom. I need to know who to call if something happens to you and Keith needs somebody.”

            She stared at him with hard eyes and he tried to clench his jaw and stand his ground. He’d always been weak to his mother’s stare. The way her eyes would glint gold and snap fire, the way her sharp shoulders would tighten – there was a wildness there, in her, that he’d never known how to handle, let alone confront. There’s something about her that he knows he can’t quite touch. Something outside his understanding. Something she only shared with one of her sons and it wasn’t him.

            “What are you suggesting?” she’d asked all those years ago.

            “Nothing, Mom, I just need to know – ”

            “No, you damn well don’t.”

            “Mom! You’re being ridiculous!”

            “ _Takashi, I have been very patient but this is none of your goddamn business._ ”

            “Patient? You’ve been the opposite of patient! You won’t answer a basic question and get defensive if I bring it up! I literally just want to know who I need to call if Keith needs someone to look out for him until I can get wherever he is!”

            “And why would Keith need someone to look after him, he has me,” she’d growled.

            “Does he, Mom?” Shiro was angry, at the end of his metaphorical rope; summers upon summers of frustrations piled one atop the other in an explosive layer cake, “Does he really? Because from where I’m standing I’ve done more to raise that kid than either of his biological parents combined!”

            He regretted snapping at her instantly but at the same time regretted nothing at all, a sick rush of satisfaction flooding his system with a wave of righteous vindication.

            He didn’t learn who Keith’s father was. And he was actively discouraged from returning to the desert the summer after he turned eighteen. The next time he saw his mother in person after that last summer was the last and he was in the hospital and he’d just been blown up and they were both too filled with regrets to even begin to touch the pratical business of being bitter.

            He never did take back those words though. And when she died, he was there to finish the job he’d started at eight years old – raising Keith Kogane.

…

_Present_

            Lance doesn’t manage to convince Keith to take the damn day off and go home and eat a whole jar of peanut butter while wearing sweatpants and feeling sorry for himself like any normal human being. But by the time his husband kicks him out of the theatre Lance is 95% sure Keith is at least somewhere in the neighborhood of functioning.

            The ex-interns are of course lying in wait in the lobby, undeterred by Keith’s impressive scowl.

            “Is his okay?” Adela demands, taking the lead.

            “What’s going on?” Alyssa asks, words tripping over themselves on the way out of her mouth.

            “Why was he bleeding? What _happened_?” Farid’s voice strains on the last syllables as if it can’t quite contain just how baffled he’s feeling.

            “Do I have to call the hospital again?” Tony says; voice flat and vaguely pissed off, like the fact that the universe dares to allow things to go wrong for Keith offends him on some personal level.

            “All of you, stop,” Lance waves at them like a conductor, shushing them en masse.

            They stare at him expectantly, eyes bright with concern.

            Lance draws in one long breath and lets it out again; today has been very tiring and it’s not even noon. “First, no calling the hospital, what the fuck, Tony?”

            “Seriously, you do not get to say that, remember last time?”

            They all nod as a group and Lance resists the urge to face-palm. “This is different. To answer your questions: he’s as okay as can be expected, some weird, shitty family drama has come up so be very, very nice to him today, and he’s bleeding because he punched a wall like a dumbass because family sucks sometimes. Got it? Cool. No more nosy questions, I feel really weird telling you anything more about Keith’s private life. He’s not really into the sharing-of-feelings thing.”

            Alyssa _actually raises her hand_ because she’s a sweetheart.

            “Yes, Alyssa.”

            “Uh. So we read his brother’s book that one time…”

            Lance nods, this is common knowledge.

            “And we were kind of under the impression he didn’t…really have…much family? Except for you and Shiro?”

            Lance sighs, “Yeah, well…you’ll have to ask him, okay? But if you’re asking about Shiro, Shiro is fine. Shiro is not the problem. And I’m not either. No one you know is the problem.”

            They stare at him skeptically. He throws his hands in the air in exasperation.

            “And now I’m dropping hints like an asshole! Just ask him yourself, see what he tells you. But be _nice_. He’s had a shitty day, okay?”

            One by one they nod their agreement.

            “So that’s a no on the 911?” Tony asks into the silence, “Because I could call and ask for the hospital and then ask _them_ for Shiro.”     

            “That seems really convoluted, dude,” Farid says.

            Tony shrugs, “Worth a shot. I don’t have his cell number.”

            “We are not calling Shiro at work,” Adela makes an executive decision, “we’ve already bothered Lance and he says Keith’s fine now.”

            Lance shoots Adela a grateful look and sneaks out as the kids are discussing their next step amongst themselves. Hopefully they’ll leave Keith alone – or at least distract him adequately for the rest of the day. He’d collected himself by the time Lance left and had gone back to the work mostly like nothing was wrong – having let Lance clean the split skin on his knuckles and taped a wad of gauze over the injuries with a strip of gaff tape.

            But what he’d said still rattles around Lance’s brain; that anguished, bitten-off sentence – _“Shiro_ _shouldn’t have come for me.”_

            Lance needs to talk to Shiro, stat.

…

_Past_

            “Why Jack?” she’d asksed one evening, sitting on the roof of the trailer, metaphorically drinking in the last rays of the fading sun and literally trading sips of whiskey straight from the bottle. It was cheap and burned all the way down, coalescing into a heavy lump of warmth in his stomach. It made him feel like he had a star in his belly, a new locus for a solar system, little solar flares racing up and down his limbs, scattering stardust through his nervous system.

            She was wearing shorts that used to be jeans before she cut the legs off and he was tracing abstract patterns over the warm, sunbrowned thigh beside him, wishing he had pens or pencils or finger paint so he could see in real time the almost-images he saw in his head. The soft swirl of color burning in the frame of her sharp ink outline. (That was how he imagined drawing her – all sharp dark lines fleshed out in strokes and swirls of incandescent watercolor, like a nebula in a birdcage, utterly majestic and impossible.)

            “Why not Jack?”

            “What, were you watching Titanic or something and just decided ‘yeah, that’s my fake identity now’?”

            He snorted and leaned back to lie on the roof, belly-up to the stars like he was surrending to the cosmos. “It’s not a fake identity.”

            “Really?” She leaned back to lie beside him, “Because you told me it’s not your real name. Sounds like some witness protection shit to me.”

            He laughed at that, deep and long, “Nah, I just got tired of being what that name meant, you know?”

            “Hmm?”

            “I was a really unhappy kid. And when I ran away I just wanted to run away from…all of it. Name included. Just, pwssh,” he made a swiping motion towards the air, “wiping the slate clean. Jack seemed like a nice bland name. Kind of neutral. I’ve known good Jacks and bad Jacks and sad Jacks and happy Jacks. Figured it was the kind of name that could mean anything without actually meainging anything, you know?”

            She turned her head to press her smile into his shoulder, “Yeah, I know.” A pause, and then, “And you aren’t drinking enough of this shit if you’re still this fucking poetic.”

            He laughed again and luxuriated in the feeling of her against him, the solidity of human touch as she slung a mostly-bare leg over his hips and settled over him, holding him in the cage of her body, her dark hair, stained blue and purple slipping down between them, tickling his nose.

            “Fucking poetic?” he asked, scarred eyebrow twitching.

            “Fuck-ing poetic,” she agreed in a sing-song voice and pressed her smile to his.

…

_Present_

**To: Shi-bro**

Text Keith

Call Keith

Smoke-signal Keith

Communicate with your little bro stat

**To: Lance**

What’s going on?

**To: Shi-bro**

His dad showed up

On our porch

This morning

Also, holy unresolved issues, Batman

DO YOU GUYS NEVER TALK ABOUT FEELINGS???

EVER????

BECAUSE SERIOUSLY.

**To: Lance**

.

.

.

Holy shit

**To: Shi-bro**

Normally I’d make fun of you,

Soccer mom that you are,

Using a swear word

BUT THIS IS AN EMERGENCY

**To: Lance**

Shit.

I’ll…

I’ll call Keith.

**To: Shi-bro**

GOOD IDEA

…

**To: Allura**

Keith’s bio-dad showed up

What do I do?

**To: Shiro**

Find somewhere quiet

Breathe

Collect your thoughts

Then call him and listen

Don’t make this about you

Listen to him

Go from there

You’ve got this

**To: Allura**

Thank you

**To: Shiro**

Just telling you what you already know, love

<3

**To: Allura**

I still appreciate it

<3

…

            Jack can’t focus on his book – a cheap paperback copy of _American Gods_ (Stacy at the diner was right, he does feel like Shadow a lot of the time). He’s read it before, over and over again since she recommended it, actually, but somehow none of it feels familiar and none of the paragraphs can come together in his head.

            God, he wants to draw so _badly._ It’s been a long time since he’s felt like this, since he’s felt the need to put pencil to paper twisting in his chest this viscerally. He’s felt the impulse plenty, but it’s always been somewhat theoretical, an idea that flashes across the insides of his eyes or settles into the back of his mind for a few days, cropping up now and again as a fond, ‘I could do that’, safely wrapped in the knowledge that he probably never will so he’s free t think about it all he wants.

            But now he doesn’t have an idea, he doesn’t have a picture in his mind he just wants to feel the shape of something coming together under his hands. What it is…that’s irrelevant.

            He scans the coffee shop and sips his latest cup of coffee, enjoying the burn on his tongue. There’s a pen in the top pocket of his canvas army-surplus jacket and a napkin dispenser within his eyeline (and a sketchbook burning an imaginary hole in the bottom of his bag).

            He gives in.

            Jack grabs a wad of napkins and pulls out his cheap ballpoint pen (stolen from the diner five states ago) and begins to draw.

…

_Past_

            “You’re really good at that.”

            “What?”

            “The art thing. You’re good at it.”

            He’d laughed, “How would you know? You think there’s beauty in math.”

            “So do you, asshole.”

            “My failing grade in high school trigonometry and I have no comment.”

            She glared at him, gold eyes glinting, “You’re so fucking smart and talented, why are you even here?”

            “Why are you, Ms. Columbia?” he’d challenged.

            “Easy. The world didn’t fit me right. Or I couldn’t fit into the world. I couldn’t make it work. Living out there…was like trying to solve a proof without any givens.”

            “More math?”

            “It’s what I know. But you…you could make a go of it.”

            “What are you talking about, Di?”

            “You could be…really fucking amazing. You and that,” she’d gestured toward his sketchbook, perched on his knee, where it always was when she worked, “Could be something incredible.”

            “I’ll take that under advisement,” he’d said dryly, trying to make her laugh, to steer her away from the subject, “but I hear to become something incredible in the art world you have to die or at least get shot and I’m not willing to deal with that right now.”

            She’d laughed, but it sounded rehearsed, like her mind was still far away and her eyes were a little sad, like she was already missing him.

…

_Present_

            Pidge should be working on this piece of coding and drinking her weight in caffeinated beverages, but she can’t shake the feeling that she knows the guy in the back corner of the coffee shop. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen him before, it’s not like she _recognizes_ him exactly, more that she feels like she _should_ know him, like he’s familiar in some way. She’s trying not to stare, honestly, because staring never goes well for her. Either people catch her staring at them like she’s trying to solve them like a math problem, and, well, that typically looks a lot like glaring to the uninitiated and has been the precursor to a lot of unnecessary confrontation. Or people (mostly guys) catch her staring and think she’s _interested_ or something and no, just no. Pidge has never been _interested_ in anyone. She’s never even had a crush. She’s pretty sure she dodged a bullet there, honestly.

            But damn, back-corner dude looks familiar.

            He’s kind of rough-looking, honestly. Shaggy black hair lightly threaded with silver, maybe around her dad’s age or a little younger. His eyes carry a set of crow’s feet that suggest long days and hard living or maybe that he was Han Solo in another life and did a lot of suspicious squinting at other intergalactic smugglers. His features are sharp and angular, and while he doesn’t look starved, he’s lean for a guy somewhere near his fifties. There’s a scar through one dark eyebrow and it, plus the army surplus jacket just contribute to the overall Han Solo aesthetic. She can’t tell what color his eyes are from this distance but the set and shape of them is somewhat familiar.

            This is going to drive her insane.

            Finally, the mystery of it all getting too far under her skin for her to ignore, she grabs her laptop and marches over to the table where he’s intently scribbling on some fraying paper napkins.

            “You. How do I know you?” she asks, beceause by coffee number five her will to live and ability to communicate in a polite, measured manner is out the window.

            He blinks and looks up at her and it hits her like a truck. He’s got Keith’s eyes. How did Lance describe them when he was particularly lovestruck and pathetic when those idiots first got together?

            _“His eyes are ike, I dunno, stormclouds or something, Pidge. They’re grey, then they’re purple, then they’re blue or black or indigo – that’s a color, right? I’m pretty sure I saw an indigo crayon this one time – anyway, they’re just_ amazing _, Pidge.”_

Pidge is pretty sure she hit him with a pillow and told him to stop babbling, but when she met Keith, she had to grudgingly concede that Lance’s sappy ramblings were right. Keith’s eyes were like thunderheads, a vortex of purple-grey-indigo-black.

            And this dude has _the exact same eyes._

            Pidge isn’t stupid. Pidge is a genius, thank you.

            And Pidge, in all her stupid, genius glory, blurts out “Holy fuck-shit, you’re Keith’s deadbeat dad!” in the middle of a Starbucks.

…

            _“Hey, kiddo, heard you’re having a shit day.”_ Shiro’s voice is comforting, kind and like a warm hug made of sound…and the last thing Keith wants to hear right now.

            “Shiro, I’m working.”

            _“I know this is kind of a lot. Okay, that was a massive understatement. Uh. How are you?”_

“Working. I was trying to work and then my brother called to fuss at me. I’m an adult, Shiro. I deal with my emotions like all adults do. I punch walls and then bury any remaining feelings deep, deep down where no one can find them.” And he cried on Lance a little, which was kind of weirdly embarassing (despite the fact that Lance himself has drunkenly sobbed about fucking _Finding Nemo_ on Keith’s shoulder at four in the morning because they make bad Pixar-related decisions sometimes).

            _“Keith. Talk to me, please.”_

“What is there to talk about? My absentee father showed up like a shitty prize at the bottom of a cereal box.” Keith deletes an email with a particularly vicious button-click.

            _“Have you talked to him yet?”_

            “I slammed a door in his face and told him to fuck off.”

            _“Did you at least get his name?”_

“Why would I want his name?” Keith enjoyed deleting that email so much he’s decided to clean out his whole fucking inbox.

            _“In case you change your mind and regret not getting his side of the story.”_

“I don’t want to know his side of the story,” Keith is in an email-deletion _frenzy_ , he is the god of gmail, “I know what happened already. He showed up to Mom’s funeral, didn’t say a word to me, abandoned me to foster care and let you ruin your life for me. That’s the definition of absentee parenting. Actually, that’s not even parenting. That’s sperm donation with bonus token gestures.”

            _“What do you mean ‘ruin my life for you’? Keith, you do get that my life is pretty good, right? There is nothing wrong with my life.”_

“Takashi, my parents’ inability to function like grown-ass adults meant you and your stupid honor code insisted on taking in a fucked up teenager before you were even out of physical therapy _after being blown up_. You can’t sit there and tell me that having to deal with my shit on top of chronic pain and screaming nightmares was in any way good for you because that’s crap. That’s crap. That’s you and your damn hero complex and your weird mom-friend syndrome where you try to nuture anyone within reach. And I am so fucking _sorry_ for what happened, I’m so sorry you were stuck with him and that you had to deal with my shit on top of yours and I’m…I’m so sorry I’m still glad you came back for me,” the last words are practically a whisper. Keith feels beaten, like his chest is caving in on itself.

“I’m…I’m so sorry Shiro.”

            Shiro makes a strangled noise on the other end of the line, _“Shut up.”_

            “What?”

            _“Shut up and listen to me very carefully, Keith. I have never,_ never _regretted coming back for you. Because guess what, I was in hell._ Hell _, Keith. I hurt all the time and I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t want to eat and my mom had just died and there were so many things that weren’t okay between us before she did and I’ll never resolve any of those issues now, not really. But then you were there and I had someone to hang onto, I had a family again. I had someone who wasn’t going to judge me, who was just going to be there. I needed that so badly, kiddo, you have no idea. Making sure you were okay…it gave me something to focus on when nothing else made sense.”_

Keith is crying now. Not sobbing, nothing hysterical or theatrical (ironic, really, considering his profession). Just silent tears slipping down his cheeks like escape artists, like thieves in the night.

            _“I needed someone to lean on just as much as you did back then, kiddo. You just didn’t see it because I didn’t let you, okay? But I needed someone just as much as you did. And then there you were.”_

Keith swipes at the water decorating his face, “No wonder people think we’re codependent,” he laughs wetly, “We kind of are.”

            _“Things turned out okay, kiddo. We turned out okay. Okay?”_

“Yeah, okay.”

            _“I’d hug you but I’m at work.”_

“I’d hit you for trying to hug me.”

            _“Good to know some things don’t change.”_

“There are limits, Shiro.”

            _“Okay, kiddo_.” There’s a laugh in his voice and things feel a lot more okay than they used to.

…

            “Wait, you didn’t _know_ about him?” Pidge stares at Keith’s-Dad with wide eyes. She’s abandoned her coding to sit backwards on a chair, arms folding across the top and stare at him incredulously as he tells his story, “How the fuck didn’t you know about him?”

            He shrugged, “His mother sent me away before she knew, I guess. And didn’t contact me afterwards.”

            “Wait, back up. Sent you away?”

…

_Past_

            They’d been drunk when they submitted his portfolio to art school. It had been Diana’s idea and her ideas always sounded better when less-than-sober. They’d done it in a fit of giggles and raucous laughter. He’d filled out the application on a whim days ago, never intending to actually submit anything, but then they’d drunk a whole bottle of…some kind of moonshine between them and off it went.

            They were sober when his acceptance came to the P.O. Box Diana kept in her name in a nowhere Arizona town.

            “You have to go.”

            “Why?”

            “Because you don’t belong in this fucking desert. You don’t. You’re too smart, too talented, you too fucking good for this dead-end place.”

            Endings tend to be simultaneously swift and slow. There’s always the buildup and rarely do we get to know what’s happening, where we’re headed, when we’re in the midst of it, we don’t get let in on that particular joke until the swift part’s already happened, the cracking, fracturing moment that splits it all in two.

            “Well maybe I want to stay with you.”

            “Well maybe I don’t want you to stay.”

            “What?”

            “I’m not going to be the reason you decide to waste your life out here going nowhere.”

            “You can’t believe you’re – ”

            “Trying to do the impossible? Of fucking course I believe that. Do you know the chances of me actually finding evidence are, even though it’s _definitely_ out there? Next to nothing! The universe is too big; this _desert_ is too big! But I’m going to keep looking because _this is something I have to do_. You, you’ve got a lot more going for you than a dead-end desert. So get lost. Don’t let me be the reason you’re fifty years old and bitter someday.”

            “Fucking hell, Diana…”

            “Get. Out. Live your fucking life and be _happy_ , got that? Be happy.”

            He could have tried the age-old line ‘but I’m happy with _you_ ’ all that sappy, pleading nonsense, but that wasn’t in him. He couldn’t be sappy or pleading. He didn’t know how. So he’d snapped back at her and they went back and forth, lashing tongues of fire competing for the same scrap of wood but in the end it was all the same. It all came down to the same old embers.

            Diana Kogane kicked him out of her life so he could live his.

            What a fucking cosmic joke that was.

…

_Present_

            The strange young woman who apparently knows his son is staring at him, “ _She_ kicked _you_ out?”

            He shrugs, “Sort of.”

            “…Oh my god. Does Keith know?”

            He shrugs again, “Probably not?”

            Pidge stares at him some more, “Fuck, now you have to tell me the whole story.”

            “The whole story?”

            “Yeah, I wanna know how you ended up in jail.”

            He jerks, suddenly uncomfortable, “How did you know…?”

            “Lucky guess. You hunch over your coffee like someone’s going to steal it. And you don’t leave your stuff alone, even just to walk over and grab napkins. You know who does that? Ex-cons and kids who’re bullied in school.”

            He gives her a dry, bemused look, “How do you know that?”

            It’s her turn to shrug, “I know everything. And fyi: Keith makes that face too.”

            He shakes his head; this day is only getting stranger.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Okay, dude. I’ll cut you a deal. You give me your phone number and I give it to Keith. If he calls you, sweet. If he doesn’t, no hard feelings, got it?” She stares him down, honey-brown eyes hard, “If he doesn’t want to talk to you, you leave him the hell alone.” 
> 
> He nods. It’s fair. It’s a better deal than anyone else has ever given him. 
> 
> She nods back. “Okay,” she pushes a napkin across the table to him, “Number.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU SO MUCH. Thank you for all your support, you are the reason I keep writing this series. 
> 
> This chapter was weirdly hard to write? Real life showed up and kicked my ass a little bit and I just didn't have it in me to keep with the angst until now. Feelings-heavy fics are a little emotionally exhausting. Hopefully we're back on track now. 
> 
> I'm sorry if there are any glaring errors here, I haven't proof-read this all the way. Or at all. Eh. 
> 
> I really hope you like this. If I leave a fic for too long, especially a delicate, emotion-heavy one like this, I kind of develop a block about it? So posting new chapters becomes a little nerve-wracking. I really hope this is good.

**Chapter 4**

_Present_

            Keith has a piece of paper where he listed all the things he knew about his father. He uses it as a bookmark, has carried it around for years. He can see the passage of time in the itemized list; watch the evolution of his own handwriting as it grew from blocky child letters to sloppy schoolbook cursive to aggressive middleschool all caps to adulthood’s spiky scrawl. He unfolds it at his desk, in the quiet of his office as the overhead lights buzz. It’s worn thin and soft now, even the red desert dirt in the creases faded with time. He’s considered transcribing it onto something else – antoher piece of paper but that feels disingenuous. He started with this paper, he’ll continue on with this paper.

            It’s a very simple list. Just scraps of information he’d picked up like a magpie, plucking facts up like bits of shiny tinfoil hidden in his mother’s careless chatter.

            It’s clear a child began it because the heading is in red crayon and the letters aren’t shaped quite right. He runs the pads of his fingers over the letters, tracing out the past.

            MY DAD, A LIST BY KEITH

            The ‘K’ in Keith is backwards and he actually switched the ‘I’ and the ‘E’ in his own name. That’s embarassing.

  1. eyes like me



That was one piece of information his mother had been strangely free with. Maybe she just realized that eventually he’d grow old enough to logically infer that he had his father’s eyes. He certainly didn’t have hers.

  1. likes books



This one came with bonus questions, a young Keith with poor spelling and worse handwriting wondering what type of books did he like, did he read a lot of books or just the same one over and over again, did he read books like Shiro or books like Mom? None of the questions were ever answered, of course. (Although, a nagging voice reminds him, he could answer them now, he could find the man and ask the questions a small Keith Kogane wanted answers to).

  1. doesn’t look for aliens (Mom does!)



Keith isn’t sure why his younger self felt the need to add the parenthetical there. Did he think that an adult Keith would forget the single fact that defined most of their childhood? Did he assume that one’s eighteenth birthday came with complimentary retrograde amnesia?

            Kids were weird.

  1. can draw



            Keith drums his fingers against his desk and considers putting the list away. It’s kind of a depressing memento, really. A sad talisman to carry around with him. He’d considered throwing the list away when he was a teenager and angry at everything. He’d considered burning it when he was feeling particularly vindictive and melodramatic.

            But he didn’t.

            He doesn’t use it as a bookmark anymore, but it’s still there, haunting his life like a strange paper shadow. He didn’t know what to do with it so he kept it.

            No, he didn’t want to let go of the little bits of the past he still had left. To throw away the list would be to willfully give up this fragment of his childhood. It wasn’t like selling Mom’s stupid alien junk on Craigslist, that shit had nothing to do with him, that was all Mom…all her selfishness and separateness. That junk was everything that had pushed him to the outer edge of the world, away from other people. That junk was everything that had pushed his mother away from him. Keith was perfectly fucking fine with selling that stuff.

            But the list…this was a decade of stolen bits and pieces of forgotten conversations smuggled away and immortalized. This was real, this was a sign that he and his parents existed, that there was some kind of connection there. He couldn’t let go of this stupid list.

            That doesn’t mean he has to finish reading it.

            He folds it back up and slides it into one of the crappy paperbacks he carries around in his messenger bag. Now is not the time.

…

_Past_

            He tried to make it at art school. He really, really tried. But he wasn’t like these people – these kids with their bright eyes and brand-new sketchbooks and big ideas. He was worn like a stone, creased like old leather, a piece of paper with dirt rubbed into it until it finally stuck, tracing out thin spider-webbing veins in dust colors.

            The scar through his eyebrow itched in strange ways. These children and their _aesthetics_ and _symbols_ and darting, restless gazes made him more aware of…everything. Every component of his body. All the pieces that didn’t fit together quite right. He felt like a tower of Jenga blocks while they were like… like lego structures. These kids, their pieces fit right. Like they were supposed to, meant to fit. They weren’t missing anything. The world hadn’t begun plucking out parts of their insides from day one. They were additive, he was subtractive.

            He didn’t understand the assignments. They were too vague and too specific and what the fuck did any of it even mean?

            He just wanted to draw. To feel the grit of graphite and charcoal beneath his fingers, to feel the rough rub of callous and chalk.

            He tried to draw Diana from memory sometimes, but she never came out right. The series of images (attempts, attempts at images) he made didn’t look like the same woman. She never had the same face twice. A professor offered to enter the series in a contest for him and he agreed on a whim.

            He won but all he could feel was vaguely hollow.

            He wasn’t pining for her, he didn’t think. It was more than that and less than that and some days it wasn’t even about that at all.

            He thought about what she said, about fitting. How something about her just didn’t fit “out there”. He wondered if all his time in the desert, all his time being alone, being Jack, being with her, being alone again had made him not fit either. Or maybe he’d never fit.

            He thought about what she’d wanted for him. She’d wanted him to be happy. But he wasn’t sure if she really understood how to be happy herself. What was ‘being happy’ anyway?

            So he did his assignments and was told he had a lot of talent but couldn’t follow directions for shit (his words, not theirs, not exactly) and fell into the odd position being simultaneously smarter than the children around him and stupider than them too.

            It was almost a relief when some guy he kind of knew walked up to him in a dive bar and said “Hey, you can draw, can’t you? Like, draw real good?” and he’d nodded because yeah, he could. And the guy said, “Cool, I’m gonna have a job for you soon,” and walked away.

            Jack lasted a whole semester before getting his first counterfitting job.  

…

_Present_

Keith makes it through the day on autopilot. He’s pretty sure the ex-interns are running interference for him, Adela managing the more diifcult conversations with directors and designers in his place, Alyssa and Farid keeping the new batch of interns out of his sight and/or line of fire. Tony brings him a green tea after lunch and orders him to “Drink it an be soothed or something, I don’t even know.”

            “I don’t think green tea is meant to be soothing, Farid. I think it’s just supposed to be good for you.”

            “It’s tea? I don’t know, I’m from Florida; no one drinks this hot tea crap there. I’m still in mourning for sweet tea.”

            That’s enough to startle a laugh out of Keith, remembering hot, ragged summers sitting on the bumper of his mom’s truck, drinking gas station sweet tea. That one time a waitress in a diner somewhere in Texas told him _“Now honey, we’ve got sweet tea and we’ve got less sweet tea, which one do you want?”_ and he ordered sweet tea and nearly choked at the taste of so much sugar loaded into one drink. _Diabetes in a cup_ his mom had called it before stealing a healthy swig.

            “Thank you, Tony.”

            Tony’s face kind of twitches in an awkward, almost-sympathetic way, “Uh, yeah, no problem, man.” He goes to leave and pauses at the door, “Um. For what it’s worth… sometimes, family just kind of sucks. And I’m sorry yours is...you know…kind of sucking right now.”

            That actually eases a smile across Keith’s face, “Thank you, Tony.”

            Tony nods tightly and makes himself scare. Keith sips his green tea and tries his best to think about nothing at all.

…

_Present_

**To: Mama**

Hey, Mami...

I’ve got a question

Sorry if this sounds weird

**To: Lance**

Is everything okay, mijo?

**To: Mama**

Did my...

Bio dad ever…

Try to talk to me?  
Did any of the girls’?

**To: Lance**

Why are you asking about this?

Do you want -?

**To: Mama**

NO!

Oh my god, nononono *no*

Just.

Keith’s Dad showed up and I started

Y’know

Thinking

**To: Lance**

No, he didn’t, mijo

When your Mom and I decided to have kids

We just went to a sperm bank

We actually did rock paper scissors

Over who had to be pregnant first

Do you want me to call?

This isn’t a good conversation for texting

**To: Mama**

Sure, go ahead

_Calling Lance…_

            Lance picks up on the first ring, “Hey, Mama. Sorry to freak you out.”

            She sighs on the other end of the line, _“No te preocupes, mjio, I’m_ _not ‘freakd out’. I just…this isn’t the kind of thing you talk about with little emoto-jis.”_

That shakes a laugh out of Lance, “ _Mama_ , they’re emojis.”

            _“First they’re emoticons, now they’re emojis. Your generation just needs to make up your mind.”_

            He chuckles, “They’re not the same – you know, whatever. You’re pretending you don’t get it just to make me explain it and I’m not falling for this again.”

            _“I’m caught, oh whatever will I do.”_

“You’re as bad as Keith,” and that reminds him all over again. Keith. “So, sorry to make it all weird, Mama. But apparently Keith’s deadbeat dad’s in town and he wants to…I dunno, talk? It just made me think. As much as I’d love to think me and the sister squad are a delightful and totally natural fusion of you and Mom’s spectacular genes…that’s preeeeetty unlikely, so…”

            She sighs, _“It’s really not much of a story. We wanted kids, adoption was difficult for a lot of reasons so we went to a sperm bank. Biologically you and Valentina are mine, Jamie and Carla are your mom’s.”_

“And Andie and Sofie are adopted,” Lance finishes the thought for her.

            She hums in agreement, _“But you are all my children. You are all mine, you understand? And you are all your mom’s. It doesn’t matter what DNA you have. You’re my kids and I love you all.”_

“But I’m your faaavorite,” Lance sing-songs; although his heart’s not all the way in it.

            She laughs anyway, _“You are mi familia. All of you. And no, your…donors have never tried to get in touch. Carly considered – ”_

“Yeah,” he interrupts, “Lala talked about looking him up, seeing who he was and if he wanted to meet…but she decided not to. You know, in the end.”

            _“Are you interested…?”_ her voice is tentative but kind.

            “No,” he cuts her off, “No way. It’s totally different, you know? Keith’s parents…his mom and dad had a relationship. I think they did, at least. Myabe his dad didn’t know about him or something? Or maybe his mom wanted to raise him on her own? I don’t know. It’s just a different situation. Sperm donor guys know what they’re doing, you know?”

            _“You’re saying ‘you know’ a lot,”_ her voice is kind, but amused.

            “I want to you really know, I guess,” he chuckles, then sighs, deflating a bit, “I don’t need more parents, Mama. I’ve got the best moms on the planet,” he grins into the phone, “And our family’s pretty huge already. I don’t think there’s room for more people to boss me around. Just…” a tired sigh, “all this drama with Keith’s dad made me think about stuff,” he rubs the back of his neck, “But we’re good. It’s all good.”

            _“How’s Keith doing?”_ People say his Mom’s the socially aware one. And they’re kind of right; she’s like Molly Weasley without the red hair or wand, but his Mama’s sharp. She’s good at reading people.

            “He’s hanging in there. He’s…he’s being Keith about the whole thing. Doing his whole ‘I’m feeling a new feeling…better kill it before it gets any ideas’ thing. But we’ll be okay. Shiro’s being super-dad as usual.”

            _“Don’t sell yourself short, mijo.”_

            “ _Ma –_ ”

            She cuts him off, _“That boy loves you so much. You do so much for each other. You’re_ good _for each other, mijo.”_

Lance sighs and lets her be right for once, “Thanks, Mama.”

            _“I’m only stating the obvious.”_

“Yeah, well, sometimes I need to hear the obvious.”

            _“Oh I_ know _,”_ she says, exaggerating the last word.

            “Hey!” he huffs in indignation but he’s laughing all the same.

…

_Past_

            Jack didn’t like counterfitting so much as he _understood_ it in a way he could never understand school. Counterfitting came with rules, it was simple. He could paint fakes by the dozen. It was easy. The art of imitation.

            He wasn’t the one who auctioned them off, either. He didn’t touch that part of the ‘business’. His contact just told him what they needed and he made it. No muss, no fuss. Easy and predictable.

            At the end of the day he’d go home feeling a little diluted. Watered down. He used to think his life was rich colors, bold lines. But he feels like an old manuscript these days or a film of half-finished watercolor paint. There’s not much of him left, just the shape of what he used to be.

            He still tried to draw Diana but it was getting harder and harder. Pieces of her falling away, knocked loose from his mind, blown back into his subconcious where they settled in and stewed. She seemed to be migrating from his memory and into his dreams. Some days he’d doze off on his couch and somewhere between waking an sleeping become utterly convinced that he was going mad, that he’d made her up, that he wasn’t himself and she wasn’t real and it was all a lie someone once told him that he’d had the audacity to believe.

            He’d wake himself up in a panic and sit there in his furnished apartment and wonder what he’d been thinking about before he’d been thrust into the waking world.

            He loved and hated the few photographs he had of her. Faded Polaroids mostly, all with some fragment of her body cut out of the frame as she moved at the last moment. Her gold eyes washed into a soft amber with time and distance. Her purple-blue-black hair bleached into an inbetween color.

            He tried to use them as reference photos a few times but something about it just didn’t work, didn’t settle right. He felt like he was looking at a stranger, nothing of her left.

            Slowly he just…stopped. Stopped bothering with his own work, just focused on the commissions. The ‘lost works’ of the great masters. Before each new project he’d take a fraction of the cut of the last and wander through the city’s museums, spending days moving between them all absorbing the art. He didn’t understand most of it, but there was something soothing about knowing that he didn’t have to. That drawing meaning from these canvases like a mosquito draws blood wasn’t necessary this time.

            And then he’d have a new assignment and he’d pick a new dead bastard’s style to steal and off he’d go. Rinse, lather, repeat.

…

_Present_

“So, jail, what’s the story?” his son’s friend isn’t letting this go. Her name is…Pidge? Why? What’s it short for? Jack doesn’t ask these questions but he thinks about them, the syllables looping round and round in his brain as he tries to pick them apart and put them back together in ways that make sense.

            “I picked the wrong fight with the wrong guy at the wrong time,” he says tersely and honestly.

            “Boo,” she says, “Not the whole story.”

            “I owe you nothing,” he points out.

            “I’m your ticket to a real conversation with your estranged son. Be nice to me,” she says with a glint in her eye.

            He snorts, “Extortion.”         

            “Yup,” she agrees cheerfully.

            His napkin sketch shifts from a simple study of the coffee cup in front of him to a doodle of the young woman’s head on a pigeon’s body.

            “How do you know Keith?”

            “Neighbors,” she says, grinning wickedly, “See, two can play at the uncooperative game.”

            He snorts, “Really?”

            “Really,” she agrees easily, “So. Story time?”

            “Nope,” he pops the ‘p’, taking some delight in her offended expression. He raises an eyebrow at her, “We live in the information age, Ms. Pidge and my son has a Wikipedia page. I don’t technically need your help.”

            Her eyes grow comically wide. “ _Keith has a Wikipedia page?”_

            He shrugs, “A small one. Linked from his brother’s.”

            Her grin spreads across her face like a coffee stain or the Cheshire cat’s smile. “Oh my god. _I have to edit this_.”

            He shakes his head. His sketch is turning out better than expected. He modifies it so it’s not so much a pigeon with Pidge’s face as a cartoon of Pidge-as-a-pigeon.

            She cranes her neck and looks at it, “That’s pretty awesome.”

            He hunches his shoulders awkwardly, “It’s what I do.”

            “Draw stuff?”

            “Yeah, I used to.”

            She narrows her eyes, “You…are a cryptic asshole.”

            He laughs at that, “Sure, whatever you say, kid.”

            She rolls her eyes, “Okay. So I’m modifying Keith’s Wikipedia page. Want to add anything?”

            “I don’t even know him. I don’t have anything to say.” _Except that I’d like to. Know him, that is. And I’m sorry._

She snorts, “That’s really not what modding your friend’s Wikipedia page is about, but whatever old man.”

            He’s not sure how he feels about the ‘old man’ dig, but his Pidge-on doodle is looking really good so he focuses on that while she taps away at her laptop.

            “Don’t think you’re getting out of telling me your life story,” she informs him.

            “Mmmhmm,” he hums skeptically.

…

_Present_

            Lance is waiting in the theatre lobby when Keith’s workday ends (thank god they’re current show rehearses in the afternoons). He’s curled up in a chair in the lobby, tapping away at his phone in a way that means he’s either texting or playing some sort of dumb game. He looks up when Keith leaves his office and smiles brightly at him.

            Keith raises an eyebrow, “Why are you here?”

            Lance places a melodramatic hand over his heart, “So hurtful with your words! The romance must truly be dead for you to wound me so.”

            And just like that everything feels normal again. It’s like something out of alignment just slotted back into place and Keith feels…almost okay again. He laughs, bright and startled and a little too hard.

            Lance smiles slying at him like that’s what he wanted all along, although he pouts theatrically. “You’re too cruel.”

            Keith leans down and presses their foreheads together. “You… are ridiculous.”

            Lance kisses the tip of his nose impetuously, making Keith lean back and rub at his face with a frown, “What was that for?”

            “You put your face near my face,” Lance shrugs, “It had to happen. It’s the natural order of things.”

            Keith rolls his eyes but holds a hand out to his ridiculous spouse anyway, “Come on, you. Let’s go home.”

            Lance takes his hand with an exaggerated eye-roll, “Not even a pet name, what have we come to?” He loops their arms at the elbow, pressing their shoulders together as they walk out the front door.

            Keith huffs a laugh, “Pet names are weird.”

            “Excuse you, I shower you with _adorable_ affectionate monikers, you ungrateful spinach puff!”

            “What did you just call me?”

            “You heard me.”

            “You’re so weird.”

            “But you looooove me.”

            “Duh.”

            They walk back to Lance’s car together and everything feels a little closer to alright.

…

_Present_

            Pidge squints at him. “Why don’t you want to tell me what you did?”

            He sighs. She won’t leave this alone. “I lost my temper on someone who really, really deserved it.”

            “I need to know more.”

            “Why?”

            “I need to know if it’s okay that you’re here. I can’t let you hurt Keith. He’s…ugh… _feelings…_ he’s family, okay? So I have to make sure you’re not some con artist asshole who’s going to screw him over.”

            That’s…really fair. “Okay. Um.” He drags in a heavy breath, “After Diana sent me away…I was a counterfitter. I’d make fake ‘lost masterpieces’ and my contact would sell them and I’d get a cut. And one time we were doing this deal with these guys and they screwed us over. But they didn’t just screw _us_ over; they screwed a lot of people over. Normal people, not criminals like us. People who couldn’t afford it. And I was hearing all kinds of shit about it but I didn’t do anything or saying anything because what do you do or say to that? But then I’m in this bar and there are these assholes and they’re drunk as hell and talking about this scam they were running out in the desert with these ‘wackos who want to find aliens’. And I lost it. I completely and utterly lost it,” he cuts a glance at her, and she’s staring at him with rapt attention utterly laser-focused on his stupid story, “I don’t know if they were talking about her. I don’t know who they were talking about or if they pulled off their con or what. But I was a little too drunk and a little too angry and they’d screwed me over. And they would have screwed her over too.”

            “So you kicked their asses.”

            “Yeah.”

            She shakes her head, “You and Keith are scary similar.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Yeah.” She pauses, considering. It’s getting dark outside, the light is dimming as night comes creeping in. “Okay, dude. I’ll cut you a deal. You give me your phone number and I give it to Keith. If he calls you, sweet. If he doesn’t, no hard feelings, got it?” She stares him down, honey-brown eyes hard, “If he doesn’t want to talk to you, you leave him the hell alone.”

            He nods. It’s fair. It’s a better deal than anyone else has ever given him.

            She nods back. “Okay,” she pushes a napkin across the table to him, “Number.”

            He scribbles his down and hands it and the napkin with the doodle to her. She seems pleased. He holds up a hand when she moves to pack up, “Just a second,” he digs through the bag at him feet, pulling out that last sketchbook, the unfinished one. There’s desert dust ground into the pages and maps of the universe in watercolor and so much Diana Kogane it makes his heart squeeze. He pulls out one of his favorites, a rough sketch in colored pencil of her behind a campfire, one knee bent upright, an elbow propped on it, her cheek resting on one fist, the other leg curled around the opposite ankle. Half her face is darkness and half is stenciled out in orange light, fire reflected in her eyes, her hair an inky mass.

            “Give him this too,” he holds it to her and Pidge takes it with tentative fingers, as if the fire in the foreground could actually burn her.

            “Are you sure?”

            “Yeah. I’m sure.”

…

_Past_

            Diana was still missing him when she picked up Shiro for the summer. The empty places, the unfilled Jack-spaces in her life seemed too obvious. It left something hollow in her center, a place for her stomach to twist itself into knots.

            “I did the right thing,” she whispered to herself when the desert wind howled her way, almost-accusatory, “I did the right thing.”

            The desert seemed unimpressed.

            “I’m not going to condemn him to a life out here. He’s so damn smart, so damn talented, so damn _much_. I’m not letting him waste away out here.”

            The desert didn’t listen to her, it never did.

            But then Shiro, her beautiful baby boy, was back and it was fine. It would have to be. She would make it fine through sheer force of will. She would make it fine until it made her sick with how absolutely, positively _fine_ it was.

            She had to.

            It was only fair to give him his best chance.

            If you love something, set it free.

            Right?

…

_Present_

            “I talked to Mama today,” Lance says, apropos of nothing, when they’re flopped on the couch together, the cats circling like piranhas, after dinner.

            “Yeah?”

            “My bio-dad was a sperm donor. Like, literally. I guess I just wondered if he ever bothered to, I dunno check in? But nope.”

            “Are you upset about it?”

            “Nah. I’ve got everything I need. I was just curious.”

            “Huh.”

            Lance kisses the top of Keith’s head, absent. “It’s your decision if you talk to your dad, babe.”

            “I know.”

            “Okay, just checking.”

…

_Present_

            Jack goes back to his motel room and doesn’t know what to do with himself. He considers calling Thace and Ulaz but doesn’t. He paces a bit until it feels stupid.

            He wonders if the kid will call.

…

_Present_

            Keith opens the dumbwaiter, surprised to find Pidge the source of the knocking on the other side. “What do you want?” he asks, genuinely surprised to see her.

            “Listen, through a series of weird events, I ran into your dad at a coffee shop. I know, I’m a little weirded out too. Anyway, here’s his phone number and something from his sketchbook. He wanted you to have them. But no pressure. You don’t have to call him. I told him I’d kick his ass if he bothered you again so…ball’s in your court.”

            Keith stares at the napkin, at the numbers, at the drawing of Diana Kogane that’s just so…it’s his mom. It’s his mom in a way that no photo has been able to be _her_ and he…he takes them both. “Thanks, Pidge.”

            She presses her lips together and gives him a long look. “It’s up to you what you do with the stuff just…trying to help out.”

            Keith surprises himself by reaching through the dumbwaiter to give her an awkward one-armed hug. She smells like coffee and burnt metal. “It’s okay, Pidge.”

            She gives him a half-hearted punch to the arm, “Let go, you sap.”

            He does, but she’s giving him an uncertain smile as they close the dumbwaiter.

…

_Present_

            Jack is trying to read _American Gods_ again but isn’t getting very far when the phone rings.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith shrugs, but the shape of an impulsive, terrible idea begins to percolate in the back of his mind. Well. Lance has said he has the impulse control of a raccoon on crack. This is a world-class, definitely, positively, absolutely, awful idea. But it’s the only one he’s come up with all morning and the sheer awfulness of it is giving him that bright, tingly feeling of adrenaline beginning to move through his chest.  
>  He hears himself saying, “We don’t have any museums in town, but we could go to the city. Hit MoMA.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PATIENCE AND YOUR SUPPORT
> 
> I know this chapter was super delayed. I promise there's nothing wrong with me, everything is fine. Real life is just busy sometimes and writer's block happened in a big way with this whole fic for a while there. I'm hoping this chapter is good? I've spent a long time trying to wrestle it into something that works so here it is.
> 
> Some notes, as usual. The autocorrect on this word doc is broken. I'm sure I missed some spelling errors when I edited *shrugs* I tried. 
> 
> And Starbucks. I'm a snob about Starbucks and espresso in general because I've worked in an independent coffee shop and know too much about the history of coffee beverages for my own comfort. And Starbucks doesn't put enough shots in their drinks. And I really wanted Keith and Jack to be grumpy old men together about something. So. No judgement if you do work for Starbucks, they're pretty good to their employees from what I hear and steady paychecks and decent benefits are very important.
> 
> A note on the art mentioned here - 'Vir Heroicus Sublimus' is a real painting and is part of the abstract impressionist movement in the 1950s. It is also literally lines on a red background and I kind of imagine Keith just staring at it for hours if left to his own devices, brain just going "?????" on loop. Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square' painting also exists. It is literally a black square on a white background. 
> 
> Also, Bertholt Brecht. My inner theatre nerd kind of oozed all over that bit of dialogue, but I really do think Keith would be a Brecht nerd. Brecht is really appealing to hyper-analytical-but-still-artistic people who aren't super into touchy-feely stuff (and find emotions confusing and stressful), and judge people recreationally. (I'm not projecting here...much).

**Chapter 5**

_Past_

            Diana almost gave Keith up for adoption. The words were there, swirling on the tip of her tongue, festering in her brain as she lay there in a hospital bed, wracked with pain.

_His best chance._

_Give him his best chance._

_Let him go._

            And in a haze of pain and drugs and flashing lights and doctors who spoke too fast and too slow all at once she couldn’t let go of the never-ending loop of thoughts.

            _You’ll ruin him._

_Condeming him to a life out here._

_A go-nowhere life._

_A dead end._

            And she couldn’t _think_ she couldn’t make anything make sense anymore. A nurse asked if the father was here, ‘the father’ like, like Jack was _god_ or something and if he was the father and her almost-born baby was the son did that make her the fucking holy spirit or something? She’d laughed instead of answering at first, a tangled mess of sound before she could collect herself enough to tell the well-meaning woman no, he wasn’t.

            She’d sent him away, after all. Given him his best chance.

            She’d never told anyone that she’d almost considered giving Keith up. Shiro was so earnest in his caretaking, so gentle and sweet and _good_ as he insisted she rest, take it easy, eat healthy food and drink lots of water. She’d look at Shiro sometimes and wonder _how_ ; how could she have possibly created something like this, someone like this, someone this genuinely, earnestly, good? He didn’t deserve a mother like her, and she knew it. He didn’t know, not yet, and it broke her heart that one day he would realize it, that he would know the truth.

            Shiro had picked a name for his baby sibling, he’d made lists and compared and contrasted and done the playground equivalent of social research, all in the interest of getting the name _exactly right._

            So Diana didn’t tell him.

            She didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t have anyone to tell anymore.

            When Shiro was born her whole family had come to the hospital. Parents, sisters, and Shirogane, in all his solid, steadfast glory. (Shirogane hadn’t deserved a wife like her either; he was a good one too.)  

            Now she was alone and it was her own fault.

            So she did the selfish thing. She’d asked to hold her newborn son and she’d seen his eyes flicker open just a tiny bit, the stormy purple-blue-grey of them. And she’d named him Keith just like Shiro had told her to, and took him home to the desert with her.

            Maybe his best chance was having a mother who loved him, she told herself, and a brother who already adored him even though they hadn’t met yet. Maybe _they_ were his best chance. She had to believe that. She had to believe she was doing the right thing. She had to.

…

_Present_

            The line clicks over as someone answers the phone and Keith hangs up before he can hear even a syllable of greeting, shooting a wide-eyed look at Lance.

            “He picked up.”

            “And you hung up,” Lance answers with raised eyebrows, “Babe, I know you’re going through something right now, but that was just mean.”

            Keith frowns at him, “What?”

            “Come on, think about it from his perspective - you come all this way to see your son and you give your number to someone in the hopes that maybe your kid’ll call you and then you get a myster caller and they hang up before you get a word in? That’s rough.”

            Keith’s frown intensifies. “Maybe I shouldn’t call.”

            Lance shrugs, expression soft and too kind, “It’s your call.”

            “Was that a pun?”

            “I plead the fifth.”

            “Do you even know what that means?”

            “Does anyone?”

            “ _Yes._ ”

            “Do you?”

            “Oh my god, Lance!”

            Lance suddenly grins at him, at Keith’s grumpy-cat expression and ruffled hair. Mission accomplished, Keith successfully distracted from his own angst. “Make up your mind, babe. Don’t string the poor bastard along.”

            Keith huffs, “I think if anyone is a poor bastard here, it’s me, literally,” but the lines of tension in his face have eased slightly and his shoulders are less tight. “I think…” he pauses a moment, “I think I should call. I’m going to wonder if I don’t.”

            “And feel guilty for the hang-up.”

            Keith rolls his eyes, but Lance is right, “Yeah, that too.”

…

            Jack frowns at the phone. That was weird. His pulse hasn’t completely quieted yet. He can’t decide if he’d gotten his hopes up, but his heartrate had certainly spiked. He sets the phone aside. Probably a wrong number. Or a prank call. Do kids still do that? Or was that only ever in movies? Jack doesn’t know and wondering is almost enough to distract him for a moment.

            He tries to go back to his book but he can’t focus, he keeps shooting looks at the phone out of the corner of his eye.

            Is he ever going to get through this damn book?

…

            The phone rings again. Keith maintains eye contact with Lance because frankly, his husband’s encouranging expressions are almost funny enough to raise his spirits and keep him from overthinking this whole thing.

…

            The phone rings again. Jack eyes it with suspicion and considers ignoring it and just reading his damn book in peace. But the traitorous part of his brain, the part that’s teamed up with his heart as its’ rhythm spikes again, tells him to take the chance and the call.

            He’s pretty sure his should disown that part of his brain. It’s probably related to whatever in him keeps making bad decisions.

            Screw it.

            He picks up the phone again.

…

            “Hello?”

            Shit. Keith did not think this through. Which, in all honesty should be the title of _his_ bestselling memoir. Let Shiro’s book be child-appropriate. Keith’s is probably going to have minimum four swear words a page and lots of gratuitus violence. Keith’s memoir will be the Michael Bay of memoirs, okay?

            And Keith is using this demented train of thought to avoid having to answer. Shiro tried to socialize him properly, he swears. It just didn’t all stick.

            “Why are you here?” is what Keith finally spits out and while it’s not as antagonistic as it could be, it’s not exactly what most people want or expect to hear when they say hello.

            _“I’m trying to get to know the son I never met. It’s going about as well as can be expected,”_ the voice on the other end of the line says dryly. Keith’s mom was right, he does have an accent, or more accurately, the theatre-trained part of Keith’s brain supplies – a dialect. The American south colors his words, adding a twang to some syllables and a drawling drag to others.

            Keith wonders if he’d known this man growing up, if he’d have an accent too.

            “Why now?” Keith’s not trying to be hostile, not really, but he can’t help the hard edge sneaking into his words.

            _“Didn’t know until now.”_

“Didn’t know what?”

            _“About him.”_

The thought hits somewhere in the vincinty of Keith’s chest and lingers, a sucker punch to the sternum.

            “Okay,” Keith hears his own voice saying, “Okay, what do you want to know?”

            _“Is this him?”_ the voice is wry but the question is real. The man is checking, making sure he knows who he’s talking to. That warms Keith slightly, strangely. Pidge didn’t give his father his number. Pidge protected him. It’s a strange thought, even three years into it, having this many people around, looking after him without being asked.

            He shoots a glance at Lance on the couch, still watching him with dark, hopeful eyes. Keith twitches his lips into an almost smile and Lance tips his head to the side a little bit, a touch concerned, all supportive. It’s almost enough to make Keith roll his eyes, playful. Lance is such a sap.

            “Yeah, this is him.”

            _“Alright,”_ the voice on the end of the line hesitates, _“Uh. Is there anything you want to know about me?”_

            Something cracks in Keith’s chest, right where he’d felt the sucker punch only a few minutes ago. “Uh,” he catches himself on his father’s vocal interrupter and laughs a little at the similarity, it’s not really funny, nothing about this is, but still, “What’s your name?”

…

            “Jack,” Jack says, “Or that’s the name I’ve been using for a long time.”

            _“Why?”_

“The name I got stuck with when I was born didn’t work for me anymore. So I picked a new one when I was eighteen.”

            _“Why Jack?”_

            “It was boring. It coud be anything.”

            _“My brother named me Keith. Because he said it wouldn’t get me picked on.”_ The kid sounds awkward, stiff, but he’s trying. This is…this is the first piece of real information Jack’s gotten from him. Yeah, the book mentioned his brother picking his name, it’s not like this is some big secret. But it’s information, it’s a fucking gift is what it is.

            Jack doesn’t know what to say in return.

            _“But he keeps saying my middle name is Copernicus so my brother’s kind of an asshole.”_

Jack actually laughs at that, it feels good. “I’d blame your mom for that one.”

            _“Trust me, I do._ ”

…

            It’s a short conversation, but it’s a first and Keith sits on the floor, phone in hand after he hangs up, feeling like he’s been hollowed out like a Halloween pumpkin, feeling like he’s waiting for something, waiting for a light to be put inside him or something. Whatever, this metaphor got out of hand.

            Lance is sitting in front of him in an instant, taking both his hands, threading their fingers together.

            “So?”

            “So he’s a guy, he’s…he’s my father and he wants to know me.”

            “That’s good, right?”

            “Fuck, I don’t know.”

            Lance squeezes his hands once and pulls the phone free of their compressed palms, setting it on the coffee table before bringing their hands back together again. Impulsively he leans down and kisses Keith’s battered knuckles from this morning.

            Keith makes a face, “Kissing it better is actually super gross if you think about it.”

            “Don’t ruin my romantic gestures,” them’s fighting words, but Lance’s voice is soft, his tone gentle and Keith doesn’t have the emotional energy to do much more than smile sappily back at him in response.

            “Just, think of the bodily fluids.”

            “Human saliva isn’t nearly as gross as people make it sound.”

            “The human mouth is one of the filthiest – ”

            Lance laughs and swings their joined hands between them, “I am trying _really_ hard not to turn anything you’ve said in the last few seconds into an innuendo because now is not the time or place but you’re making it _very_ difficult.”

            Keith snorts and stands, pulling on their joined hands until Lance follows him upright. “I’ll remember that for future reference.”

            “You’d better. There were some really great lines wasted there.”

            They stand together for a moment before Keith looks at the kitchen with a sigh, “It’s time for dinner, isn’t it?”

            “Cambell’s tomato soup and grilled cheese?”

            Keith chuckles, “At this rate we are never going to convince Hunk that we can cook for ourselves.”

            “Excuse you, I _never_ want to convince Hunk we can cook. Then he’d stop feeding us and that would be a tragedy, mister.”

            Lance is right so Keith doesn’t protest. And comfort food sounds really good right now. “Okay, let’s have your shitty salty can soup.”

            “Shut up Mr. Microwave-chili-is-a-food-group. Sit in the kitchen; I’ll cook. And no more sass.”

            Keith sits on the counter and watches as Lance butters bread and picks three types of cheese and makes the world’s most uneccesarily-convoluted grilled cheese.

            “He’s southern.”

            “Who?”

            “My dad. He’s southern. He’s got the accent.”

            “Huh. You could have been cowboy-Keith.”

            Keith makes an offended sound, “I could not!”

            “Don’t worry,” Lance winks at him over his shoulder, “It would have been hot.”

            “You’re the worst.”

            “Don’t insult the hand that feeds you,” Lance points out, flipping the sandwiches over and stirring the soup.

            Keith makes no comment other than a vague hum. He’s still thinking about the conversation with…not his dad, but maybe his father? Jack. Whatever. “His name is Jack. He picked it himself. Said he wanted to be a new person once he was eighteen. I get that, I think.”

            Lance, who has never really wanted to be anyone but himself, with the exception of a few rocky, low-self-esteem years as a teenager, can’t really fathom the idea of rejecting who you are that utterly. But all he says is “Well, I’m glad you’re Keith.”

            And Keith shoots back, “Well yeah, Shiro picked my name specificially to keep me from getting my ass kicked by elementary schoolers. My name is well-researched as hell.”

            It’s been a long day and a lot has happened. But things seem to be coming out all right for now. And Lance’s grilled cheeses are freaking fantastic, thank you very much.

…

            Jack doesn’t know what to do next so he calls Thace.

            _“What?”_

“Hello to you too.”

            _“I have caller ID so I can intentionally modulate how rude I am depending on the caller. My question stands. What do you want?”_

Jack makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh; “Maybe I should call Ulaz for moral support.”

            _“What an excellent idea,”_ Thace responds dryly.

            “I talked to my son today,” Jack says apropos to nothing.

            Surprised silence and then, _“Was the interaction…positive?”_

Jack runs a tired hand down his face, “Complicated. The whole damn day has been…complicated.”

            _“Are you willing to spend the time to uncomplicated it?”_ Thace asks in that painfully direct, awkwardly insightful way of his.

            “Yeah. I’m gonna try.”

            _“Then what are you talking to me for?”_

Jack snorts, “Because we’re friends, and friends tell each other about major life events.”

            _“And here I thought you just called for advice.”_

“Goodnight, Thace.”

            _“Farewell, Jack. I’m sure Ulaz will text you a relevant gif by tomorrow. He’s discovered an app for it and now all our text-based conversations have gone straight to animated hell.”_

Jack chokes on a laugh, “And you’re telling me this why?”

            _“Because ‘friends tell each other about major life events’ or so you say.”_

Jack chuckles all the way through ending the call.

…

_Past_

            Jack read a lot in prison. There wasn’t much else to do except read, work out, and intimidate other guys into leaving him the hell alone. The first thing he asked Thace when they met was “What are the chances of me ending up back behind bars if I steal one of their books when they let me out?”

            Thace had raised an articulate eyebrow and said “Exponentially higher since you’ve admitted to planning the crime.”

            Jack had laughed at that and Thace had given him a dry look and that was pretty much their whole relationship in a nutshell. Thace wasn’t his therapist, he wasn’t his cheerleader; his job was to make sure Jack followed the rules once he was outside and to deal with him if he violated parole.

            “I feel like you should be more encouraging, you know, really try to set me on the path of straight and narrow.”

            “And I feel like the word ‘y’all’ should be expunged from your vocabulary and yet here we are, flaws and all.”

            There was a part of Jack that wanted Thace to be proud of him. The same part that had been disappointed over and over and over again as a kid as one authority figure after another let him down or kicked him to the curb. Jack had thought he’d paved over that part of himself when he hit eighteen and hit the road, but no such luck.

            “So am I your favorite parole-ee?”

            “You’re the one I least want to punch in the head on a daily basis.”

            “So I’m your favorite.”

            “Don’t make me change my mind.”

            So Jack may not have any friends, but he finished his parole period without any violations and Thace has not, to date, felt compelled to punch him in the head, so here they are.

…

_Present_

            Keith wakes up and remembers he doesn’t have work today and feels unaccountably disappointed. Lance is gone, off to the community center to chase kids around, but it’s Saturday and Keith doesn’t have a show or rehearsal and he’s not sure how he ended up one of those people whose life revolves around work but here he is, alone in his bed, wondering what the fuck people even do on their days off.

            Lance has left a note for him. It probably began the morning on Lance’s pillow, but Keith must have had some pretty wild dreams last night because it looks like he pushed all the pillows, including his own off the bed at some point. The rest of the bedding is halfway to joining them on the floor, a puddle of blankets and sheets slinding of the bed in a messy tangle.

            Keith doesn’t find the note until he tries to get up and ends up going down in a knot of bedding. It’s probably a good thing all the pillows were on the floor, otherwise his face would have been much the worse for wear. As it is, he claws his way upright out of the sinking mire of his bedding, only to peel a stray sticky note off his cheek.

            It’s blue, covered in Lance’s messy scrawl (in dark blue glitter pen, dammit, Keith thought he got the last of those out of the house) and reads: “Tried to wake you up to say goodbye, but you threw a pillow at me so that didn’t happen. Love you, babe, see you tonight! Remember, everything is gonna be ok.” He literally wrote ‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to’. Keith shouldn’t find that endearing. There is nothing endearing about bad grammer. And yet.

            And then Keith realizes, in a rush of remembering not unlike having a bucket of very cold water dumped over your head, that yesterday, in fact happened and was not some bizarre dream.

            Well shit.

            At least Lance thinks it’ll be fine?

…

            Jack doesn’t know what to do with himself when he wakes up in his motel. Well, that’s not necessarily true. He showers and haphazardly shaves and throws on some clean clothes, and drinks some crappy motel coffee but once all that’s done he really doesn’t know what to do with himself. He checks his phone and, just as Thace had warned, there’s an encouraging gif from Ulaz featuring a kitten in his text messages. But other than that there’s nothing else and Jack orders himself not to feel disappointed. It was enough that his son called yesterday. Expecting anything else is wrong.

            Unsure what else to do with himself and tired of watching Ulaz’s kitten gif on loop, Jack shoves his feet into his boots and goes to yesterday’s coffee shop. Maybe he’ll run into another one of his son’s friends. Or maybe he’ll just bankrupt himself drinking more corporate coffee than he can afford. Either way, it’s better than sitting here trying not to wonder where the stains on the walls came from.

…

            Keith knocks on the dumbwaiter until Pidge opens it. Ha, he knew she was home.

            “What?” his neighbor demands when she finally opens her side. Her hair is a flyaway dandelion mess around her head, she has a smudge of something that looks like soot or ash on her cheek and she has some kind of goggle pushed up her forehead. Keith decides not to ask.

            “Where did you run into my dad yesterday?”

            “Coffee shop.”

            “Which one?”

            “The Starbucks a couple blocks away, why?”

            Keith shoves his hands into his jeans pockets and rocks on his heels, trying not to meet her eyes.

            Her eyebrows shoot for her hairline, “You called him?” she’s obviously choking down some kind of emotion, she sounds actually kind of excited for him, “And now you want to find him?”

            “Uh, yeah? Kind of? Ideally I’d prefer to low-key stalk him until I’m ready to talk to him again – ”

            She nods, “Fair. Observe him in his natural habitat.”

            “But that’s probably pretty creepy.”

            “Definitely, but that’s cool.”

            “So I figured a coffee shop was like, neutral territory.”

            “Seems legit.”

            They stare at each other for a moment before Keith speaks again. Sometimes Keith envies Lance and Hunk’s ability to emote all over each other about pretty much anything. And then he remembers how awesome it is to just kind of nod at someone and know they got what you were saying/thinking/feeling without needing the words or actually, you know, the _feelings_ part. “So the Starbucks?”

            “Yeah, wait,” struck by a sudden idea, she digs in her pockets and fishes out a green plastic card, “I’ve got like two dollars left on this thing, use it for the good of us all.”

            “The good of us all?”

            “I can’t drink that sugary shit anymore, but my grandma gave me fifteen dollars in Starbucks money. Use it for good,” she says with mock solemnity, “find your father; bond over how Starbucks doesn’t put enough espresso in their drinks.”

            Keith is unexpectedly touched by the gesture, awkward as it is. “Uh. Thanks, Pidge.”

            She nods decisively as he takes the card. “Okay, good talk. I’m going back to my project.”

            “Project?”

            “Making my own fucking espresso machine.”

            “Cool. If you blow up my house there will be consequences.”

            “I’ll keep that in mind.”

            Keith closes the dumbwaiter with a few dollars in Starbucks money and a weirdly optimistic feeling in his chest.

…

            Jack’s pretty sure there’s only half as much espresso in this Americano as there should be. Also the kid behind the counter (Jack isn’t sure when everyone under the age of thirty started looking twelve, but the fetus who wrung him up looked like he should be packing a brown bag lunch and heading off the the first day of middle school) gave him a funny look when he asked for an Americano in the first place and Jack was momentarily concerned he’d have to explain how to add two shots of espresso to a cup of hot water.

            He didn’t, but he’s pretty sure there’s only one shot of espresso in this so maybe he should have.

            He sips his drink and lazily sketches on napkins and wonders how the fuck he became a crotchety old man so damn fast.

…

            Keith is 100% sure there’s only half as much espresso in this Americano as there should be but he’s given up on explaining it to the kindergartener behind the counter because thus far all that’s gotten are blank stares and tentative offers to call their manager over. Waving off the child’s further attempts to placate him, Keith shoves a disgruntled dollar in the tip jar (he’s not going to be That Customer, dammit) and turns to face the store.

            His father – Jack – he has a name now, a name to add to the list burning a hole in the paperback book shoved in Keith’s back pocket, is instantly recognizable as the only person in the place not wearing an army surplus jacket aesthetically or ironically. The canvas is dark green and worn at the edges in a way that says long use, not intentional design. He doesn’t have any patches sewn onto it but it’s repaired in odd places in neat, no-nonsense black stitches. The ankles of his jeans are rucked up around his dusty boots and Keith is strangely reminded of his mother.

            Well. Maybe not so strangely.

            Keith swallows his unease and walks over to the table, picking at the plastic lid on his disposable cup. He’d considered bringing his World’s Okay-est Husband travel mug but then he’d decided at the last minute to leave his messanger bag at home and in a fit of misplaced nerves found himself weirdly stressed about where he’d put the travel mug once it was empty if he didn’t have his bag. So here he was, holding a disposable Starbucks cup and feeling awkwardly aware both of his choice to buy Starbucks coffee and how neurotic his entire chain of reasoning up to this point actually sounds.

            Also, you know, walking across a coffee shop to confront the father he’d never met but whatever, no pressure.

           He glances down at the disposable cup – for what, reassurance? He doesn’t know but suddenly he’s noticing the fact that Starbucks has somehow managed to misspell ‘Keith’ and that is how the first thing he’s said in person to his father since yesterday morning is “How the fuck do you justify spelling Keith with a y?”

            Jack looks up and there’s a jarring moment where Keith is staring into his own eyes in a different person’s face. “I dunno, but they dropped the ‘c’ in Jack.”

            Keith blinks, coughs, choking on a laugh and shakes his head. “No shit?”

            Jack nods, slow and sure, “No shit.”

            “Huh,” Keith feels his lips twitching toward something like a smile.

            They stare at each other until it gets awkard.

            “You know,” Jack begins, slow, but much less certain now, “If we weren’t blood relatives this would be a lot less awkward.”

            Keith snorts, “Is that a joke?”

            Jack blinks, maybe surprised at his own words, “…sure sounds like it.”

            Keith sighs, running a restless hand through his hair. “Fine, fine,” he pauses a moment, “You know what, fuck it. Hi, I’m Keith, it’s my day off so I decided to do the most awkward, miserable thing I could think of and chat with my estranged father in a Starbucks.”

            Jack raises both eyebrows at that, the scarred one jerking up just a little bit higher than the unscarred, but he takes the hand Keith holds out to him and shakes it once, firm. “I’m Jack,” he says and then, dryly, “You know, I mostly just go to museums or do things I actually enjoy on my days off.”

            Keith shrugs, but the shape of an impulsive, terrible idea begins to percolate in the back of his mind. Well. Lance has said he has the impulse control of a raccoon on crack. This is a world-class, definitely, positively, absolutely, _awful_ idea. But it’s the only one he’s come up with all morning and the sheer awfulness of it is giving him that bright, tingly feeling of adrenaline beginning to move through his chest.

            He hears himself saying, “We don’t have any museums in town, but we could go to the city. Hit MoMA.”

            Yeah, Lance is gonna kill him. If Shiro doesn’t get him first.

…

_Past_

            “Let’s go to New Orleans,” Diana said one morning, daybreak sun cutting its way through the RV’s blinds, outlining her body in gold.

            “Why?”

            “Because I’ve never been.”

            “I have. It’s just a city.”

            “I still want to see it,” she said, her voice brimming with the kind of energy only she could harness, “I want to try Mardi Gras there.”

            Jack rolled his eyes and rolled over, still half asleep, still tangled in her sheets as she strode around the cramped kitchen, making coffee, shoving poptarts in the toaster. He watched her move, the way slips of sunlight caught in her hair, on her skin. If he closed his eyes she’d still be there, in bright neon relief against the darkness of his eyelids.

            “Mardi Gras is in a week.”

            “Plenty of time,” she threw a grin his way, her hair still a bedhead riot of black and purple and faded blue-green, “Come on, Jack. Let’s drive to New Orleans. Make it an adventure.”

            And for some reason, maybe because the thought of an adventure was appealing, maybe because the sight of her in his too-large t-shirt was appealing, maybe because he was itching to go somewhere, be somewhere else, too, he agreed.

…

_Present_

            Jack did not plan on driving to New York City today. Which is just as well, because he’s not the one driving, but he also didn’t plan on riding shotgun in his son’s car on a spur-of-the moment trip to NYC either so it’s not like his plans are really coming together either way.

            The car is silent and Jack wonders if Keith is overthinking this too. He gets confirmation when his son breaks the silence with, “You know, in movies they just montage past the awkward parts.”

            “Yeah,” Jack agrees because what else is he supposed to say?

            A moment of stiff silence and then, “What kind of music do you listen to?”

            “Huh?” Jack had just settled into drifting off into his own thoughts when the kid’s voice shakes him out of them again.

            “What kind of music do you listen to?” It’s an uncomfortable question, not because of the content but because of the context. This is a crappy first date question; this is a getting-to-know-you at summer camp question. It’s actually kind of funny, really.

            “That the best question you could come up with?” Jack asks because he apparently decided to remove his brain to mouth filter today.

            “Shut up,” Keith grumbles and just turns the radio on. There’s already a CD in the player and Alanis Morissette’s ‘Not the Doctor’ filters in through the speakers.

_I don't want to be the filler if the void is solely yours_  
I don't want to be your glass of single malt whiskey  
Hidden in the bottom drawer  
I don't want to be a bandage if the wound is not mine  
Lend me some fresh air

Jack huffs a half-laugh, “Your mom loved Alanis Morissette. And the Indigo Girls.”

Keith nods, “And Journey and Joan Jett and Johnny Cash,” he chuckles, “She was kind of a stereotype of herself sometimes.”

“Nice alliteration there,” Jack observes and when Keith flicks a look at him he shrugs uncomfortably, “With all the Js and all.”

Keith actually laughs a little at that.

“What? You expect me to be some illiterate thug?” Jack jokes, but he’s half-serious. What did she tell their son about him? What the hell does this kid think of him?

Keith shrugs, shoulders crawling up to his ears briefly before resettling, “I don’t know. Alliteration just doesn’t…you know, come up in conversation much.”

“Nah, I guess it doesn’t,” Jack settles back, disappointed for some reason he can’t pin down.

Keith opens his mouth, reconsiders, and closes it. He hums a little. The song is creeping toward its second chorus.

_I don't want to be the glue that holds your pieces together_  
I don't want to be your idol  
See this pedestal is high and I'm afraid of heights

“Mom didn’t really tell me much about you,” Keith finally admits, “I mean, not really? She’d say little things sometimes, but not a whole lot. I have a,” he makes a vauge gesture toward the paperback book shoved in the center console, “List,” he admits, uneasy on the word, “I started it when I was a little kid, it’s why like half of it’s in crayon and spelled wrong. But that’s all the stuff I know from Mom. About you, I mean.”

Jack reaches for the book on reflex and stops himself, “Can I read it?”

            Keith shrugs again and in his hunched shoulders and hard-edged profile Jack sees a ghost of the boy he probably used to be. “Whatever you want.”

            Jack slides the book out of the cupholder it was jammed into. It’s a paperback, a little beaten up, the pages yellowed at the edges. _The Collected Works of Bertholt Brecht_. Jack almost doesn’t want to open it, not yet.

            “Who’s this Brecht guy?”

            Keith’s head tips to the side curiously, like he didn’t really expect the question. “Playwright, German, fled Germany to escape Hitler during World War II. Kind of a big deal.”

            Jack snorts a laugh, flipping idly through the books’ pages, “Okay then.”

            Keith sighs, as if realizing that maybe he’d been a little terse, “Brechtian drama is a big, complicated theatre thing from the twentieth century and I kind of figure you don’t want to hear me ramble about it for two hours.”

            “Ramble away,” Jack says, pages settling on _Threepenny Opera_. The list is still jammed into the book; he can see a scrap of old paper sticking up somewhere around _Mother Courage and her Children_. But he figures they can let that rest for a bit. He’s a little curious about this Brecht guy. And this _Threepenny Opera_ play sounds interesting. They have time.

            “Uh, okay. So Brecht’s whole thing was he wanted the audience to know they were watching a play.”

            “If they didn’t know that after buying tickets and sitting down I think they’ve got bigger problems,” Jack observes dryly.

            Keith actually laughs a little, “Yeah, but most plays were all about making you forget you were watching a play, you know? Suspension of disbelief. Making sets and characters and things as realistic as possible so you’d think of the characters as real people and emphathize with them. But Brecht didn’t want you to emphatize with his characters, he wanted you to see everything about them, their virtues and their flaws, and judge them. He didn’t want you to get emotionally invested, because he was using his plays to show the problems with how the world and people worked – how all the little bad decisions and poor judgments add up.”

            Jack is listening and thinking about prison, about how everyone had a how-I-got-here story and it almost always conveniently put the blame on someone else.

            So he asks the kid questions and he listens as tension slides away and Keith warms to his subject, eyes getting bright, fingers fidgeting on the wheel as he keeps himself from gesturing with his hands. He’s so much like his mother it hurts and Jack can’t believe he missed this, all of this.

            But he has what he has; so he listens to his son tell him about a long-dead German playwright.

…

_Past_

            “Lance. Lance. Lance.”

            “Oh my god, why are you awake?” Lance flailed vaguely in the direction of his boyfriend’s very annoying voice and hoped Keith would get the message.

            “We both have the day off.”

            “Yes. This is factual.”

            “I want to go somewhere.”

            Oh god, this conversation wouldn’t _end_. “Why are you telling me this?”

            “Because you’re coming too, it’ll be fun.”

            Lance made a disgruntled whale-sound into his pillow, “Babe, I love you, but fuck off.”

            Keith shoved him because Keith is _rude_ , “Stay awake, we’re going on an adventure.”

            “Oh my _god,_ why? Where?” Lance blinked tired eyes open to see Keith, fully dressed, the lunatic, leaning over him in the morning half-light.

            “Anywhere,” Keith’s eyes were bright and his restlessness simultaneously adorable and infections and Lance is _weak_.

            So Lance hauled himself out of bed and followed Keith on a road trip that somehow turned itno a Lost Weekend in Jersey and neither of them have any regrets. Well, Lance had one thing, not really a regret, but an enduring point of confusion – when he told Shiro about Keith’s apparent break from sanity Shiro just shrugged and said “Sometimes he gets like this, I blame our mom” before Keith, who apparently has the hearing of a highly evolved bat, threw a shoe at him and said “excuse me, but you ran away to Canada, you don’t get to fucking talk”. Lance isn’t 100% sure what the deal is with the brothers and their wanderlust but he’s broadly okay with it. He kind of has to be.

            And impulse-trip Keith is kind of adorable. (Although Lance now knows the truth, that Keith actually pins down good times for possible trips and notes those open times as options in his dayplanner, there are even color-coded sticky notes involved.)

…

_Present_

            Keith has wandered around New York a lot. He skipped school more times than is probably healthy or legal his first month or so living with Shiro and he definitely didn’t ‘just hang out at the apartment’ all the times he told Shiro he did while his brother was at work. It’s been a decade, so Keith doesn’t know the city as well as he used to, but he knows enough to get them around. It’s different with his father in tow, although he’s not sure how. Maybe because, unlike Shiro or Lance, this isn’t a person who knows him inside and out, but is instead someone who probably, by all rights, should.

            The car ride down had actually been better than Keith expected in a lot of ways. He’s pretty sure he actually likes Jack. He’s an interesting guy, he’s smart, and he didn’t just put up with listening about Brecht, he asked good questions and made it a semi-functional conversation. Keith thinks he and Jack could be friends, maybe. But there’s always the elephant in the room that is his mother, his parentage, and their twisted-up, complicated history with both.

            It’s really too bad, honestly.

            But they wander New York anyway and Keith finds himself telling stories. Short things, scraps of real life. It’s surprisingly easy.

            “When I was fifteen Shiro took me to Central Park for the first time. I climbed all the trees and a cop had to tell me to get down when I started jumping from tree to tree.”

            “Sounds like you didn’t get a chance to climb all the trees, then.”

            “Hyperbole, old man.”

            And then later, “There’s this restaurant in Chinatown that only the locals go to because none of the tourists can find it and I was supposed to meet Shiro for dinner there but he got held up in traffic so I’m just there and I’m like sixteen and bored. And I’m not sure how, but by the time Shiro gets there I’m locked in this weird competition with this old man over who can eat the spiciest food. Shiro thought I’d have to have my stomach pumped, but I was fine.”

            “Your mom once challenged a whole bar to a drinking contest.”

            “Isn’t that what what’s-her-name did in the first Indiana Jones movie?”

            “Where’d you think your mom got the idea?”

            And then later, “Mom taught he how to play poker, but she taught me how to cheat without telling me it was cheating. I didn’t figure out I was playing it wrong until I got in a bar fight over it when I was living here. Shiro had to bail me out. I’m not sure who he was more disappointed in: me or the guys who tried to fight me. I think if they cops let Shiro back to the cells he would have lectured those guys like a suburban dad until they apologized.”

            “Did your Mom teach you how to throw a punch too?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Well at least she taught you how to do both. I woulda just stuck with the punching.”

            “You play poker?”

            “Yeah, but I don’t cheat.”

            “So you lose at poker.”

            And Jack raised his scarred eyebrow and that’s how they found a bar and cleared out the pockets of the lunchtime crowd. Which was easier than it sounded. Daydrinking thugs aren’t exactly cardsharps. But by the time they finished the last round, they actually had enough cash for museum admission, so there was that.

…

_Present, elsewhere_

**To: Shiro**

Did Keith leave you a message?

**To: Lance**

No?  
Did he call you?

**To: Shiro**

Yeah

Apparently he and his father (????)

Are going to NYC for the day

Keith’s idea

**To: Lance**

I’m gonna kill that kid

**To: Shiro**

He says its fine

He’s been Snapchatting me selfies all day

**To: Lance**

Lance

You know him

Keith makes horrible decisions

Recreationally

**To: Shiro**

We’ve been working on it

Now he mostly just makes them when he’s stressed

Oh

Shit

Aaaaand he just texted me

**To: Lance**

What’s happening?

**To: Shiro**

Nbd, but…

he and Jack kind of paid for museum admission

with their ill-gotten poker gains

**To: Lance**

Who is Jack?

**To: Shiro**

Keith’s dad, apparently

They talked last night

Not sure how that turned into impulse roadtrip but…

**To: Lance**

I’m gonna kill that kid

…

_Present, NYC_

            “I don’t get it.”

            “It’s modern art.”

            “It’s a bunch of lines on a red background.”

            “It’s modern art.”

            “With a pretentious name.”

            Jack shrugs, watching as Keith continues to stare at _Vir Heroicus Sublimus_ in horrified fascination. “I like modern art. It’s easy to copy.”

            Keith snorts, “Well yeah, if I knew all I had to do was draw black squares on white backgrounds in revolutionary Russia to become famous I would have done that years ago.”

            That actually makes Jack laugh. “I think you missed your window of opportunity for that, kid.”

            “Not being alive in 1915 is a small inconvenience,” Keith says flatly, “I bet Pidge and Hunk could make me a time machine.”

            Jack snorts, “You have weird friends.”

            “And you apparently had a career in forgery,” Keith raises an eyebrow in his general direction as they move on, through the clean, minimalist hallways. Damn, this kid is sharp.

            “Something like that,” Jack’s comfortable with his past, really, but he’s not sure how comfortable this kid will be with it, “I got into some trouble, though. Lost my temper on the wrong kind of people. Went to jail for a bit, got out, stayed out of the business.” He tries to keep it casual, but the words sit heavy on his tongue.

            But Keith is nodding, thoughtful, absorbing the information. “Huh. That why you left? Jail?”   
            Jack shakes his head violently, a twisted laugh catching in the back of his throat, “No. Your mom sent me away,” the laugh cracks its way free, “I guess she thought I’d be in a museum like this someday or something if she let me go.”

            Keith is watching him with sharp, familiar eyes. He’s clearly not _comfortable_ per se, but his posture is one Jack recognizes. The tense lines of someone ready to fight or flee, not judgemental but more than willing to lash out if cornered. It’s not Jack’s history that bothers him; it’s the fact that it didn’t coincide with his own until today.

            “Okay. Tell me the story.”

            So they look at modern art and Jack tells him a story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keith's decision-making process continues to fascinate me, especially how, even in canon he makes really extreme choices whenever he's stressed. Like, the more stressful the situation, the more extreme the option he picks is. Like, there could be three choices and, given the right circumstances, Keith will pick the completely absurd one that wasn't even on the list to begin with. That boy is hardcore. Hence why we see him going on an impulsive road trip here that makes no sense. It's literally just because when I sat down to write this chapter I was like "okay, normal awkward conversations over an extended period of time" and Keith was like "nope, day trip to NYC, let's go" 
> 
> That's my story and I'm sticking to it.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally Keith speaks and no matter what he says Jack can’t help but feel relieved that at least the waiting part is over.  
> “So what happens now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE WHO SUPPORTS THIS SERIES, YOU ALL MEAN THE WORLD TO ME
> 
> I know this update's late but writer's block hit like a freight train and I got busy with real world stuff so I had to take a little break and let the creative juices come back. I hope this chapter is all you hoped for, I really do. It may not seem like it, but I worked very hard on it. (Seriously, writing this damn thing was like pulling teeth and I have no idea why). 
> 
> Some notes, as usual, 
> 
> Kudos to everyone who got my very subtle Once Upon a Time reference in the last chapter!
> 
> The Bob Rauschenberg sculpture referenced here is called 'Monogram' and it is real, feel free to look it up. I'm pretty sure its home is not actually the MoMa but I transplanted it there because a taxidermied goat seemed pretty emblematic of this whole trainwreck of a fic, haha.  
> The song at the end is John Cougar Mellencamp's 'Jack and Diane' which now makes me feel feelings every time I listen to it, which I do not appreciate.

**Chapter 6**

_Past_

            “You must be Diana’s kid – you look just like your mom.”

            Keith wasn’t sure who this person was, but the words were familiar.

            “Except for your eyes, I’ve never seen somebody with eyes like yours.”

            Those words too and Keith never knew what it was about being under the age of eighteen that made people think they could make casual observations about your appearance like that, but he didn’t like it much. It made him feel scrutinized, like he was a bug under a microscope. When he told his mom that she’d just laugh and say, “Maybe you’re not a bug under a microscope, you’re a star above a telescope,” while ruffling his hair and obviously changing the subject. Mom wasn’t too good at feelings.

            But one of the hallmarks of his childhood was this exchange – little Keith standing silently by as yet another one of Mom’s weird friends told him he looked just like her (duh, he’d think, of course he did, she was his _mom_ ), except for the eyes.

            Keith wasn’t sure when he and Shiro started reading the _Harry Potter_ series together but he vividly remembers the look on his older brother’s face when Keith had snapped, with surprising vehemence, “Why doesn’t Harry ever tell them to shut up about how much he looks like his dad? Doesn’t he ever get sick of it?”

            Shiro hadn’t had an answer for him, but Keith never could let go of the feeling that the most unrealistic thing about the whole damn series, more improbable than the wizarding world itself, was Harry never just snapping one day under the weight of the eleven-hundreth inane comment about how much he looked like the parents he’d never known.

…

_Present_

            Jack can’t get a read on Keith. His son hasn’t said anything since Jack’s story began and now that he’s run out of words all Jack can do is watch this familiar stranger’s face and wonder what he’s thinking. Which is damned hard to do in a way that doesn’t seem overbearing or creepy.

            The fact that Keith hasn’t said anything in the fifteen minutes since Jack’s story ended doesn’t help either.

            It’s never silent in a museum, especially not one this large. Museums have a reputation for silence, but so do forests and both are bull. Any place holding living things all living their lives at once is bound to be filled with the kind of soft, surrusrating background noise you take for granted until it’s either gone or the only thing in your ears. So Jack is here, stuck between walls and walls of modern art, listening to the sound of other people’s lives happening in the distance, waiting for a response from the one person who matters in this whole building.

            It’s pretty damn nerve-wracking, actually.

            Jack hates feeling nervous. He thought he’d outgrown the feeling a long time ago but no, it’s still there, lying dormant, waiting for circumstances to get grim enough for him to need to feel it again.

            Finally Keith speaks and no matter what he says Jack can’t help but feel relieved that at least the waiting part is over.

            “So what happens now?”

            Jack blinks. Fuck. Damn. He doesn’t have an answer. And hell, he could have thought of one in the fifteen painfully awkward not-silent minutes between the end of his sorry tale and Keith speaking. But no, he had to waste that time feeling _nervous_. What a waste.

            “I don’t know,” he says because it feels unfair to lie and he’s never really liked lying anyway. He’s made a career out of untruths but he still doesn’t like the way they sit in his mouth.

            “Huh,” Keith says blandly, looking around the gallery. He’s got an expressive face, but that doesn’t make the emotions on it any easier to read. A pause as they stare at rows and rows of brightly colored canvases that aren’t meant to be understood. Looking at Keith, Jack thinks he might begin to finally ‘get’ modern art. It’s a surrender, it’s giving up on anything ever making sense and just embracing the fact that life’s a fucking mess and that’s sometimes okay. He’s pretty sure no art appreciation class would ‘appreciate’ his interpretation but it feels more real than anything the books in the gift shop could have to say.

            “You know why those shitty Hallmark movies always end with the estranged parent dying of some incurable disease?” Keith says, apropos of nothing and Jack is trying very hard not to be offended (seeing as he’s the estranged parent in this metaphorical Hallmark movie and all).

            “No, haven’t really given it much thought, myself,” he says, an easy drawl you’d have to squint to see the sarcasm in.

            Keith side-eyes him, mouth hooking up at the end in an inscrutable smile. “Because,” and Jack can’t tell if his son’s voice is sad or bitter or laughing at a joke that is’t all that funny, “No one knows what happens next in this situation.”

            Jack snorts, the kid is right. “And it’s a lot easier to tack dramatic swelling music onto a tragedy.”

            Keith laughs, a soft little huff of wry, ironic air, “And it turns out it’s a lot easier to come to terms with difficult relationships when one of the parties is safely dead.” He does sound sad on the end of that one.

            “Your mom,” Jack can’t judge, he’s in the same boat and it’s an ugly one.

            Keith nods, pinning a Bob Rauschenberg sculpture with a thousand yard stare. The taxidermied animal’s glass eyes gaze placidly back at the two of them and Jack almost wants to laugh at how serene a dead barnyard animal can look when standing on a platform of painted chaos and wearing a tire around its middle.

            “Some days I just want her to fucking leave me alone,” Keith tells the taxidermied goat, “It feels like she follows me everywhere, she colors everything I do and I just want it to _stop_ for five fucking minutes so I can be a _person_ for once. Some days the character wearing my name in my brother’s book seems more real than I do,” he blinks and each word hits Jack square in the chest, where his battered, weary, terribly _old_ heart sits and half-heartedly thumps along to this conversation as Keith keeps talking, “I go to my husband’s house for Christmas – “ and despite himself it seems, the corner of Keith’s mouth twitches upward at the mention of his spouse, “and his family is so _normal_ and so…. Settled, I guess. They all know who they are and how they fit into the world and they’ve always known, and if they ever didn’t know they had a whole host of stable, settled people there to help them figure it out. Me, I never had that. Every bit of stability I’ve ever had I’ve had to fight for with my bare hands. And I hate myself for envying them, but I do. They love me and I envy them.”

            “But you love them too.”

            Keith raises an incredulous eyebrow at him, “Of fucking course.”

            And that pulls an unexpected laugh out of Jack’s tired old chest where his battered, weary heart sits, weighed down by words and years. “So there you go. You love them and they love you.”

            Keith looks away again, “Yeah, well, I loved Mom and Mom loved me and that wasn’t always enough, you know?”

            “Different situations,” Jack says with a shrug, “I’ve never loved anyone like I loved your mom. Probably won’t ever again. I don’t regret a minute of our time together. But her ghost follows me everywhere I go and sometimes I’m tired too.” He reaches out and rests a hand on his son’s shoulder (he feels solid, real, like a person, no matter what he says).

            Keith doesn’t say anything in return, but he leans a little bit into the hand, like a child wanting comfort but not knowing how to ask for it.

…

_Past_

            The thing about the night his mother died is that Keith doesn’t remember anything out of the ordinary about it. He doesn’t remember much of the day leading up to the night of the accident either. It’s the kind of shapeless, ordinary day that’s meant to settle in beside weeks and months and years of other shapeless, ordinary days, the building blocks of the past, the support staff behind the hours and minutes sharpfocused with meaning in our memory.

            He wishes he remembered something about that day. He wishes he had more concrete details. But all he remembers is another sun-bleached day in the desert. Waking up early to sneak past the heat and set up Mom’s equipment, napping through the hottest part of the day, eating when they got hungry, smearing lotion over sunburns and reading yet another cracked-spine paperback from a library sale.

            (He remembers what book he was reading that night; he’s never finished it. In those early days when he’d read anything he could get his hands on, old pulp fiction westerns he could get for twenty-five cents apiece in dusty antique stores were his bread and butter – now he won’t touch the genre.)

            He remembers the day she didn’t come home. He remembers waiting and waiting and waiting as the trailer got hotter and hotter in the heavy, wet aftermath of the storm that killed her, and escaping out to the roof with his westerns when the little metal oven got unbearable.

            When he tries to remember that day it’s just a smear on his brain an all he can remember clearly is the overbearing scent of air, hot and still.

            He called 911 after the second night. One more dead-air day and they found the wreck and her body.

            And Keith hates, hates, hates the fact that the only thing he can remember about when his mom died was the taste of stagnant, overheated air trapped in that suffocating trailer and a nondescript, nothing day to mark the last time he saw her.

…

_Present_

            The walk out of the museum and into a bustling afternoon. The sunlight has changed shape since they walked in, turing heavy and gold like fresh honey in their absence. Keith checks his phone and finds a string of irate text messages from Shiro and a bunch of out-of-context memes from Pidge (his neighbor expressing her concern and curiosity the only way the little gremlin knows how). They both bring an unexpected smile to his face. He feels lighter now, the world isn’t trying to crush him like a bug anymore and maybe, just maybe, this strange little afternoon allowed some burdens to be lifted. _“Her ghost follows me everywhere and sometimes I’m tired too.”_ Keith cuts a glance to Jack and sees…just a man. Just a man with both hands in his pockets and both feet on the ground, eyes tracing the tips of skyscrapers. Maybe they’re a family that’s always looking up like that, looking for something beyond the horizon.

            Maybe they’re people tied together and rattling against each other like marbles in a box and maybe that’s what family is anyway. People bouncing off of each other, people leaving a mark on you as you leave a mark on them. And sometimes it’s a gentle tap and sometimes it’s a hit that leaves you cracked and dented.

            And maybe Keith needs a drink and a reality check before he lets himself get this philosophical.

            “Where to now?” Jack breaks into his thoughts.

            Keith shrugs, scrolling through Shiro’s irritable texts, “Probably back to town. My brother’s fussing at me. I should probably go remind him I’m twenty eight years old and do what I want.”

            Jack snorts and shakes his head, “Lead on, kid.”

            And somehow that vote of confidence makes Keith smile just a little bit.

…

_Past_

            Jack’s home wasn’t warm or loving when he was a child. It was loud and harsh and smelled like sticky spilled beer on the floor and felt like crumbs ground into the worm-down fabric of a second-hand couch and sounded like angry shouting and crashes and the staticky tv always on in the background.

            And it was temporary.

            Jack remembers leaving and he remembers one house after another, strangers and paperwork and group homes and grabby hands. He remembers different schools and different faces and names blending one into another until they became nothing more than syllable soup. He remembers the certainty of always knowing the kid in the next bed over came from somewhere worse than he did and that his story isn’t new or different, just sad. He remembers his social worker’s tired face. He remembers her hand on his shoulder on his eighteenth birthday, the watery blue of her washed-out eyes staring into the stormy purple-black of his as she begged him to stay in school.

            He hadn’t listened to her and sometimes he wonders what his life would have been if he had.

…

_Present_

            The drive back is easier. Some of the tension humming between them has eased, but this new peace leaves something empty between them. They’re both being cautious, uncertain if it’s worth it to try to speak and risk bringing all that strain back again.

            “What kind of music do you listen to?” Keith breaks the silence with the wry question, recalling an earlier car ride and an earlier awkward ice-breaker and Jack actually laughs.

            “All kinds,” he says with an honest shrug, “I’m not picky.”

            Keith rolls his eyes, fingers tapping restlessly on the steering wheel, just like his mom, always moving. “Everyone says that. Everyone is a liar.”

            Jack snorts, “You know, you’re kind of right.”

            Keith nods, “I like kids. They’re honest about what they like and don’t like. They don’t try to lie to make you feel better.”

            Jack chuckles, “I wouldn’t know. Never spent much time around kids.”

            “Oh I know that,” Keith says and it’s a joke, Jack hadn’t realized they’d gotten to the point where they could comfortably joke about his twenty-eight year absence but apparently they have because Keith’s stab at irony is actually kind of funny. “I don’t spend a ton of time around kids but Lance likes to drag me to community center events and make me volunteer.”

            “What a burden, having to give back to the community because someone you love asks you to,” Jack says dryly and Keith laughs.

            “Now you get it.”

            Silence and then, “Wikipedia says you’re married.”

            “I have a Wikipedia?”

            “You should probably check it. Your friend said she was going to ‘edit the shit out of that’ so you might need to fix it.”

            Keith shakes his head, “I have a Wikipedia page,” he says, a little disbelieving.

            “It was pretty boring, if that makes you feel better.”

            “Not really, that just means Pidge made it worse.”

            “Probably,” Jack says with equanmaity and something else shakes loose in Keith’s chest. He’s laughed more than he expected to today, all things considered.

            “But yeah,” he remembers the original comment, “I’m married. His name’s Lance. He’s kind of ridiculous but I love him.”

            Jack just nods, staring out at the middle distance, “I feel like I stepped out of a time machine into the future. I meet my kid for the first time and he’s married and almost thirty.”

            Keith shrugs, “Probably easier this way. Teenage me would have punched you.”

            “That’s fair,” Jack smiles, a little sad, a little distant, but real, “Tell me about Lance. And your friends. Catch the time traveler up.”

            And he listens to Keith’s story this time.

…

            Keith pulls up outside his father’s motel and puts the car in park. It’s mostly dark now, yellow street light is sneaking through the windows at odd angles to cut strange shapes in shadows across the dashboard. Keith drums his fingers on the steering wheel, still staring at out at the asphalt ahead of them. He clenches and unclenches his jaw, tapping out a restless three-quarter-time beat with his hands. “What did you expect to happen?” he asks suddenly in the stillness, “When you came here. What did you expect to happen?”

            Jack shrugs, the seatbelt making a strange zipper sound as his shoulders move under it. “About what happened on the first day. Shouting, door slamming. Maybe a politely worded request asking me to leave and never bother you again.”

            “Then why did you come?”

            “Because of probability,” Jack says, “Because for every scenario where you didn’t want anything to do with me there was the less likely scenario where you wanted to know me.”

            Keith nods. That actually makes sense. That’s how he’d think about it too, if it were him.

            “So what happens now?” he repeats the question from the gallery. He’s still not sure of the answer.

            Jack shrugs, “I can’t live in a motel forever. But I’ve found there’s always a dive looking to hire a dishwasher and I kind of want enough cash to buy paint again.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I mean I think I need to drive around a bit, find my footing, maybe finish filling up the sketchbook Diana gave me when she kicked me out,” Jack glances over and Keith wonders if it will ever stop feeling strange to look into eyes just like his in someone else’s face. “But I’m gonna stay close, a couple hours away,” a wry smile and that’s familiar too, “In case you’ve ever got a day off and no one to bum around NYC with.”

            “No one calls it NYC but tourists,” Keith says because his voice is on autopilot at the implications.

            Jack shrugs again, “Guess I have to stick around New England then, become less of a tourist.”

            Keith feels an uncertain smile sneaking up on his face as he nods, “Sounds like a good plan.”

            “You don’t mind?”

            “That this whole conversation feels like a setup for finding your hotel room empty tomorrow morning because our family has a shitty track record when it comes to goodbyes?”

            “Sure.”

            “Yeah, I don’t mind. Just…if you’re gonna be close by…actually be close by. I don’t have the energy to waste on being disappointed if you bail.”

            Jack nods, slow, accepting, “Okay. Message received.”

            “Good,” Keith nods, decisive, and unlocks the passenger side door.

            Jack smiles wryly, “Is that permission to take the coward’s way out and disappear tomorrow morning?”

            “Only if it’s a temporary type of disappearing,” Keith says, “Shiro’s gonna be pissed he didn’t get to meet you.”

            “Next time,” Jack says and it sounds like a promise.

            “Next time,” Keith agrees, and he tentatively allows himself to believe it, “Maybe you can meet Lance next time too.”

            “Sounds like a plan.”

            “Next time.”

            “Yeah.”

            A moment as Jack climbs out of the car and then Keith, struck by a strange, capricious impulse, grabs the battered paperback from the center console and passes it through the door. “Take it.”

            Jack takes the book, thumbing the pages with a calloused thumb. “Thank you,” he says, and he means it.

            “You’re welcome. See you soon.”

            And Jack nods, an agreement made.

…

            Keith returns home, feeling drained but better. Like a fever’s broken and all that’s left is the good kind of empty, the feeling before the rebuilding.

            Lance is there with a million questions that Keith makes gentle, one-word responses to until Lance pauses and comes over to stand beside Keith where he sits, exhausted on the couch. A warm, long-fingered hand cards through Keith’s dark, unruly hair and he leans into the touch.

            “Tired, babe?”

            “Yeah.”

            “You okay?” All of Lance’s questions boiled down into two words.

            “Yeah. I’m good. It’s going to be good.”

            “Okay.” And Lance sits on the arm of the sofa and Keith leans back against his chest, allowing fingers to slip soothingly through his tangled hair.

…

            Jack opens the book of plays and a piece of old paper covered in decades’ worth of crayon and pencil marks falls out. He picks it up and reads, in crooked child font – ‘My Dad, a List by Keith’.

            His lips press together in a smile that’s warm and wry and pained all at once and begins to read. Maybe the next time he visits he can help his son make sense of these little odds and ends of information.

            The next time he visits.

            His son.

            Jack feels better, more…how did Keith describe it? Settled. More settled than he has in a long, long time.  

            Tomorrow morning, very early, he’ll get in his car, all his possessions in a beat-up duffle and he’ll begin to drive. In a few weeks he’ll turn his car back around and come back here and stay in this fleabag motel and run into his son’s friends at coffee shops and meet his son-in-law whose mere name makes all the sharp lines in Keith’s face unwind all at once, and shake the hand of the almost-stepson who raised his son for him.

            But for now he sets the list to one side, tucked safely inside the book, stacked carefully on top of _American Gods_ , and pulls out his old sketchbook and begins to draw a New York City skyline.

…

_Past_

            Diana turned up the radio in their truck, “Hey, listen, it’s our song.”

            John Cougar Mellencamp crooned some simple lyrics for a simple song from the speakers.

_A little ditty 'bout Jack & Diane  
Two American kids growing up in the heart land_

_Jack he's gonna be a football star  
Diane debutante in the back seat of Jacky's car_

“Do you think they were happy?” Diana asked out of nowhere. She was staring out window, her long, sun kissed legs stretched out across the dashboard, crossed at the ankle, absolutely stunning like every piece of her.

“Who?” her Jack asked.

“Them,” she gestured at the radio, “Do you think they were happy? Do you think it was enough to just… _be_ like that?”

_Saying oh yeah_  
Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone  
Sayin' oh yeah  
Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone

John Cougar sang from the radio and Jack didn’t have an answer for her but he was pretty sure the song did. It’s a sad song, he thought, or a happy one, depending on your point of view. Are they content or are they just stuck? Is this the best time of their lives and is that a tragedy or somehow noble?

“I think they’re lucky they live in a song,” he finally said, “they don’t have to find out the end of their story. They can just keep thinking of new ways it could go.”

Diana smiled at him, the whole world in her eyes, “Okay, Jacky,” she said, softly a smile caught in the corners of her lips before she turned and half sang, half shouted the final verse out the window and after a moment he sang-shouted it with her. __  
  
Oh yeah, life goes on  
Long after the thrill of livin' is gone  
Oh yeah say life goes on  
Long after the thrill of livin' is gone  
  
Little ditty about Jack and Diane  
Two American kids doing the best they can

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This concludes the Keith's Dad fic. I know a bunch of people really wanted to see him meet Lance and Shiro and I tried to make it happen but it just didn't work with the arc of this story. This particular story is ultimately about Keith and Jack finding each other and their individual journeys dealing with suddenly having a son and suddenly having a father. I'll probably write a lighter-hearted family dinner oneshot featuring Jack and the whole gang at a later date, we'll see.

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title from 'Walk Through the Fire' by Zayde WØlf ft. Ruelle


End file.
